Scene From The Startup Capital: Seesmic & Vinvin

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur gets it on with French funnyman and blogger Vinvin. Loic and Seesmic’s caffeine fueled CTO Johann Romefort are incredible. They are hard at work ’round all hours and having obvious fun with the process. How could the below be anything but?

Retro-comment: From yday

Tethered to the laptop still, but must run.

Two clinks to GOOG, with its empire of $10.6 billion revenue last year comprised of mostly ad sales, with a model built from simple and brill distributing [ + unifying ] of other content, for rewriting the rules yet again with OpenSocial.

One to watch for: The Gphone.

It will be compelling to see how Microsoft will try and play catch up.

What does FB’s valuation look like today, I wonder? On us all a little rain must fall.

Empire Strikes Back: Google OpenSocial

So that was my fix of drama for the evening.

Am as indolent as all get-out now, so just a few lines. It has been an eventful week in startup schemes, but today’s twilight highlight is summarized in one sentence:

Google OpenSocial debuts this Thursday.

Hosts include

- social networks Orkut, Ning, Friendster, Hi5

- business connection sites LinkedIn, Viadeo

- organizational service Plaxo

- CRM application company Salesforce

- industry heavy Oracle

On the developers side, enter

- movie fan community Flixster

- application and widget provider RockYou

- social music site iLike

- photo and video media creator Slide

Orkut, Ning, Friendster and Hi5 tall up to roughly 100 million users. No mention on Facebook or Myspace. One of my favorite bloggers and Ning Founder Marc Andreessen comments that Facebook and Myspace are not included, at least in the duration, for applications have already been developed for their audiences.

In the words of Rob Hof of Tech Beat:

The Google platform, called OpenSocial, potentially lets software developers create programs that will run on any social network that accepts the standards (though each site will have control over which programs, or widgets, will run on its real estate). Google’s Joe Kraus says it’s not just about making Google social, but “making the entire Web social.”

“This is an open version of what Facebook has done,” says Andreessen.

“This definitely poses a real challenge” to the prospect that Facebook would have the biggest platform for social programs on the Web. Developers can potentially reach even more people than on Facebook alone, and other social Web sites don’t have to persuade developers to write just for their sites, which
they generally don’t have the resources to do.

“Developers found their new gold strike,” Michael Arrington writes, “and they will soon all be there, mining away.”

…..

Thinking tangentially and relationally, here is a Bill of Rights for usage of the OpenSocial web, authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington.

…..

Gigaom, OpenSocial, Google’s Open Answer to Facebook
Techcrunch, Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial to Launch Thursday

Blog.P.Marca, OpenSocial: A New Universe of Web Apps..

Techworking, Why Google Didn’t Shed Tears For Facebook

Tech Beat, Google’s OpenSocial: Take That Facebook!

Is content king?

“One of the things no media organization can do now is cancel the future,” mused a director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation [ BBC ] to a Time magazine reporter.

More topical wittering on this tomorrow. Am late, must hop.

Himalayan on Hulu

My little man was a flame point peak-faced Himalayan: quietly questioning, lovable trouble. Partial to only running water, loves hockey puck, talkative, question mark, gentle, rare little mogwai, loves love. Lucked into him at a shelter. [ Video from Hulu ]

Maka-Maka vs. Facebook

Extracted from Techcrunch

Eric Schonfeld, Co-editor

Google may have lost the bidding war to invest in Facebook, but it is preparing its own major assault on the social networking scene. It goes by the codename “Maka-Maka” inside the Googleplex (or, perhaps, “Makamaka”).

Maka-Maka encompasses Google’s grand plan to build a social layer across all of its applications. Some details about Maka-Maka have already leaked out, particularly how Google plans to use the feed engine that powers Google Reader (known internally as Reactor) to create “activity streams” for other applications akin to Facebook’s news and mini feeds. But Maka-Maka goes well beyond that.

Maka-Maka will be unveiled in stages. The first peek will come in early November. As we reported previously, Google is planning to “out open” Facebook with a new set of APIs that developers can use to build apps for its social network Orkut, iGoogle, and eventually other applications as well. To recap what we wrote earlier:

Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information – the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. . . . Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform – meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

We’ve now learned that the original November 5 date Google is shooting for may be delayed. “They need more time,” says one outside developer working on the project. “It is a challenge for them,” confirms another. Still, the expectation right now is that some announcement will be made the week of November 5 (perhaps the 8th or the 9th), and will most likely be limited to Google’s existing social network, Orkut. The APIs will be announced, along with as many as 50 partners that have created applications on top of the APIs. (Most of the top app developers for Facebook will be included—think RockYou, Slide, iLike, SocialMedia, etc.—and a few new ones as well).

All eyes will be on Google, but don’t expect anything too earth-shattering straight out of the gate. Many of these apps will be copycats of what is already available on Facebook (just as the very first apps on Facebook were ported over from other parts of the Web). This first go-round, Google will just be trying to match Facebook’s ante. Remember, even on Facebook, the best apps didn’t emerge on Day One. And now Facebook has a six-month lead.

The bigger challenge for Google in the U.S. is Orkut itself. While there may be 24.6 million monthly visitors to Orkut worldwide, only 500,000 of those are here in the U.S., according to comScore. Cool social apps aren’t much good if none of your friends use them.

That’s where the bigger plan for Maka-Maka comes into play. Maka-Maka is very strategic for Google.

Responsibility for it goes all the way up to Jeff Huber, the VP of engineering in charge of all of Google’s apps. Huber is on record as saying that the way Google plans to compete is by using the Web as the platform instead of trying to lock developers into Google’s own platform. One way it will do that from the start is by creating two-way APIs so that any app created for Google can be taken to other Websites. (Whether this will extend to actual user profile data within Orkut or elsewhere inside Google remains to be seen because of privacy issues, but the apps themselves will be portable). And data from other social sites will be able to be imported into Google’s social apps as well.

The bigger vision is to combine all of Google’s apps and services through Maka-Maka. Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. Your contacts are in Gmail. Your feeds are in Google Reader. Your IM buddy list is in Gtalk. Your upcoming events are in Google Calendar. Your widgets are in iGoogle. And don’t forget about your search history. Overtime, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath.

The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.

Financial snapshot: October, 29, 2007, 11:24am ET.

Yes, some blogs are profitable

Sam Zuckerman, Staff writer
San Francisco Chronicle

In 2005, when Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Arrington started TechCrunch, his popular blog on Internet startups, he saw it mainly as a chance to indulge his obsession with young technology companies. But it turned out that Arrington had latched onto something big. TechCrunch became the go-to site for the scoop on new Web companies. And, as technophiles flocked to TechCrunch, advertisers followed suit. Arrington’s blog morphed from a labor of love into a fast-growing business…

Find the remainder of the article here.

Chips & digg breakfast

Someone asked what my fave toy is as of late. [I replied seesmic.] He said knowingly, “The web never sleeps. Watch out, more exciting news coming in the next week or so.”

It’s fairly easy to pique my curiosity.

So good morning to old friends and new ones. Have a swish day tapping at your news, breaking news [ yes, know it's a Saturday ], readying to launch, and testing those next best things. I wish you inspiration to make it happen.

…..

My mid-morning meanwhile is throwing together coffee, toast and a sweet potato chip breakfast, browsing some digg articles, then out for my rounds of the day. In the afternoon, I will find a quiet cafe to tap out some writing, sort out some plans, book tickets, find a camera with higher megapixels than two [ see below for why ]. Plenty of wittering on some new Web 2.0 startups of interest to come later.

Stepping out with me tonite is a thick electric gloss of satin slip a la Nicole Miller such promised drama calls for make-up and accessory subtlety ]. We will be celebrating an intimidation of birthday style and a love for the cool environs of October late. Yay.

Photos from Nordstrom, DK Images.

The reason why

Here, songstress Rachel Yamagata.

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Scene from the startup capital

Fifteen minutes ago, Loic Le Meur started another seesmic day.