Michael Arrington and the Gillmor gang: exclusive transcript [1]

Mike: Mmm hmm.

Steve: I'm hearing your bit torrent scooping up all the CBS shows so that you can watch them on your time schedule.

Mike: I can't remember the last time I watched CBS television show. I can't remember the last time I was on a CBS owned television station for any reason at all.

Steve: Letterman? You don't watch Letterman?

Mike: Pardon me?

Steve: You don't watch Letterman?

Mike: No. I watch TV. When I do it's HBO or Showtime, usually they are series or something because that is the only decent stuff on television.

Man 3: You watch Charlie Rose don't you?

Mike: I watched it twice.

Man 3: Both times you were on.

Steve: So, Marc Canter - Marc Canter -

Mike: Marc Canter is on?

Steve: Yeah.

Mike: Thanks for the link Marc.

Marc Canter: No problem sir.

Mike: I didn't realize you were having some kind of data summit thing. I don't think it's appropriate to have something like that without me there. I mean, I am one of the leading lights in the data portability movement.

Marc: It was mainly for geeks. It was just all the guys. It was all the practitioners, the guys who are actually writing the code and we were able to discuss key issues.

Of course, the Facebook shutdown happened during the summit so we were able to discuss that in real time. It was pretty interesting.

Mike: Again, I would appreciate it if you brought me in as an expert in those areas.

[overtalk]

Marc: Again, most of the people showed up by the way so they will fly high.

Steve: OK. So, what I am trying to do is stitch the Facebook thingamajig into this particular conversation, given what we were just talking about which is that these clouds are going to start to try and create the user relationships.

Isn't that what is going on with Facebook Connect and the Friend Connect that Google showed on Monday?

Marc: Well, let me first point out that, in the case of Comcast, they already do have those people signed up. They are going to try and go in and connect together they are installed base around the country and offer them all e-mail synchronization capabilities.

Steve: Yeah, I think that's bullshit. But I've had Comcast for six years and I have never once looked at my e-mail address and never will.

Man: Yeah.

Man 2: Yeah.

Marc: You're typical of absolutely nobody though, except the other people on this call.

Steve: Yeah, exactly.

Marc: No, no, no, no, no.

Steve: Good for you. The ivory tower nonsense. The number of people that are influenced and motivated by RSS technology that nobody even knows what it stands for, is enormous in this economy.

So we can talk about early adopters being a clueless part of the marketplace, but everybody will be there shortly.

Man 2: I don't know.

Marc: Comcast's world - I have my doubts.

Steve: They are never going to get there. By the time that they are surfaced as some sort of a vendor with a user relationship, there are going to be four or five other people on top of the stack above them that are the ones that the user thinks -


Steve Gillmor: They're never going to get there. By the time that they are surfaced as some sort of a vendor with a user relationship, there's going to be four or five other people on top of the stack above them. That are the ones that the user thinks they're dealing with.

Man 1: Exactly.

Man 2: Comcast is looking at this as just a list sort of an activity and they'll kill that and people will go away in no time. [noise] Brian Roberts doesn't know his ass from his elbow about any of this stuff. He's already under siege from stockholders from missing opportunities. Unless there's a change at the very top, I don't understand why this is going to matter to very many people. But as Mike said and as I said earlier, it's sort of a cloud opportunity for them.

I mean they're looking at the sports franchises. They look at people like the Red Sox doing this TV show called "Sox Appeal." You know what that one is, Dana? Where they have it's a dating show and the young good looking guy and the young good looking woman are sitting on top of the left field wall. And they have dates and you know, that sort of content is very viral potentially. And could get sort of a franchise built online.

And a lot of the different sports franchises both pro and probably in the South college too, could build content and build that into the Internet. And Comcast could be the platform for all that and they could sell some ads. But I don't think Brian Roberts is the guy to execute that.

Man 3: Yeah, no I agree. But I think you're right, it's an untapped opportunity to take these affinities, whether it's an affinity for sports or an affinity for dating or food. All these lifestyle things, Harley Davidsons and motorcycles.

Bring that in through a digital connection of some kind, match these people up and then give them the opportunity to create content back at you. Whether it's a discussion, whether it's a chat or a tweet, and then that's a nice little viral engine.

The more content that's created, the more people get affinity. The more affinity, the more they're tied in. And then you can monetize it from everything from t-shirts to advertisements to a new motorcycle.

Steve: Yeah, but they're like Sun Microsystems, they're not going to get any of that money. It's going to go right past them.

Man 3: That's why having brand, having content affinity, having lifestyle affinity is where the money should be. And the digital [??] opportunities are just commodities.

Steve: OK, I get it. So, Mike Arrington, are you still there?

Michael: Yep.

Steve: OK. Can you explain what's going on currently with this Facebook Friend Connect spat?

Michael: Yeah. Just hold on one second. Hey, so you've got to add a logo to that. Yep, it's posted, so...

Steve: Suddenly we're in a Laurence Feldman video again.

Michael: Yeah, "Hendricks!" [laughs] No we just broke a story. So you guys are talking about some really random stuff. And I really think that, you know, I think that Marc kind of nailed it when he said I was right, in his post. And I think this is all about - and I'm just kind of joking around - but I really think that what this is all about is a land grab. And it's really nothing more than that.

And this is what I wrote last night in the middle of the night because Scobel's post really pissed me off. And I'm happy to talk about that too, but I think that if you look back at the days of the mid to late 1990s, walled gardens were getting a lot of attention. People hated them, but they had the big market caps and AOL is the perfect example of they get you in and they keep you in.

And you know they had their problems, and eventually the open web sort of broke that down. And I think Steve, I think you were here sitting in my office a day or two ago talking about how the original walled garden was email at CompuServe. Was it you saying this? Anyway that eventually open email just broke apart those walled gardens as well.

So I think that today the only way that people can really have a walled garden is by trying to own user identity. And by that I mean the core sort of definition of you on the Internet. Louie Lamure [??] wrote a story a few weeks ago where he talked about his identity is distributed all around the Internet.

And he hates the fact that it sort of ends up being centralized. I think he was talking about FriendFeed at that point. For some reason he didn't like that, because he wasn't in control of it.

But you think about, we have pictures at Flickr. We might have videos at YouTube. We have our email account, we have our profile page, we have our blog, etc. Maybe up to 20 different places that we consider our identity. Our twitter account now I think is becoming increasingly that way.

And you know, there's problems with that. The fact that it's decentralized, but it also means that each of those companies owns a piece of us. And they seem to be hoping to really hold on to that data and not let it out. In other words, not let you take it back very easily. And not let you share it easily with other applications.

You can think about how every time we join another social network we have to re-add our friend list. And they try to make it easy by using your address book from Google or things like, although I generally try not to give them those credentials. But it's a real pain in the butt. And then synchronizing it and you add friends over time.

And we probably all have at least four or five distinct friend groups around the Internet. And so that's why the social networks are so important. The fact that they have our identity, some basic profile information and our friends list, it's just this hugely valuable information.

So the post I wrote yesterday is basically saying how this is the new walled garden. All these guys are becoming open ID issuers hoping that you use your Yahoo ID or whatever to log in around the Internet and sort of make it your permanent ID.

The social networks, all three of them - well, MySpace and now Google if you count them which they're not really a social network yet with any presence - but they're all trying to create software now where you can take your friends list and take your basic identity and sort of port that out to third party websites. So that you don't have to rebuild your friend list. Which is the upside for users.

The problem is that none of them, they're all talking about open standards and how they care about the user. But as we saw yesterday when Facebook shut down Google, they all want to be very much in control of the tools used and the standards set on how this data is shared and what can be done with it.

So I think we're seeing the beginning of a major data war and a race to grab users and their data. And then a race to see how much of that data they can sort of keep behind their walled gardens. And so I think that's what we're seeing and that's why I wrote the post, because I want to call that out.

And I think the main thing that I wrote in my post was how dare Facebook tell me... I sort of repositioned the argument, I said how dare Facebook tell me that I can't give Google access to my data? And let Google then do things with it.

Steve: Well, that's exactly right. Finally somebody has realized that they own their data in the first place.

Man 4: But aren't these guys also kind of playing a hierarchy of data in terms of who owns what about how many people? And then that's going to determine their valuations in their mind.

Steve: It may determine their valuations, but it has nothing to do with the facts. The users own their data, period. And you know, I don't know what Scobel said that pissed you off...

Michael: Well OK, let me talk about that because what Scobel did... See, Scobel screwed up earlier this year, because he used a Plaxo tool that went into Facebook and grabbed all of his friends contact information. And that's not trivial to do because all that contact information is presented in a JPEG. It's an image because Facebook doesn't want people to easily scrape it.

So Plaxo went in, pulled up the friends list, pulled up each page. Used optical character recognition software to turn that into free text and then export it into Plaxo. And because of that, Facebook just banned Robert Scobel. Shut down his account temporarily. He was wrong then. And the reason I think he was wrong to try to do that is he thought, "This is my data, I want to export it."

But my argument was, that isn't his data, that's my data. If I'm his friend and he's pulling my contact information out of it, he's changed the rules on me. The rules that I know are set by Facebook, which is that the data is presented only in an image, etcetera and he's exporting where God knows what could happen to it.

And I don't know if, a couple years ago I wrote about a company called Jigsaw. Which actually people get paid to upload contact information for possible sales leads. And I think it's one of the worst things on the Internet. And so this sort of this my basic contact information, I need to have some control over who gets that and how. So I think he was wrong. And I think he knew he was wrong.

So yesterday, he sees this situation happen where Facebook bans Google from letting people export their own contact information. And in his eyes, I think he saw it as an analogy to what happened earlier in the year. So he changed his position and said, "No, no. I think Facebook is right. I think...