Alright Facebook. I didn't want it to be like this, so let me tell you in a way that you'll understand. You know how you started out as a program for nerdy college boys to rate the best ladies, find which ones were available, and see if there was a way to hook up? You know how you've grown up to now be much more than that - maturing into a platform that routinely sends me Mafia Wars invitations, and wants to poke me every so often to make sure I'm around? Well congratulations. Because just like in high school, sometimes the sweaty jock who doesn't wash his hands after using the john still gets the best girl - while those of us who carried her books and wrote her poetic love letters and timed our walking to go by her locker at just the right time find ourselves on the outside looking in again.

Yeah. I get it. I get how I could BS and say "I'm happy for you." "I only want what's best for you." "Take good care of her." But look. I know your reputation. You're not trusted. I know about the other girls. I know they change - and not in a good way - after you've been with them. So yeah.

Today, you announced you were buying FriendFeed - in what looks like it might have just been a two-year-long job interview for a dozen of Google's brightest minds (courtesy of Drew Olanoff, who called immediately after news broke). It's not like we didn't really know something was up, after all - you could see in the way the FriendFeed team rolled in all giddy this morning at a time well before when they usually rise, waiting for the other shoe to drop. You could see in the way they collectively had a heart attack when I walked into their offices last week unannounced and caught them in what was called "a company meeting" - which practically needed bouncers out the door for how quickly I left.

Here's the thing. FriendFeed is the good girl. FriendFeed is the one that has a 4.0 GPA and had big dreams of an Ivy League diploma. And yet, she ends up with you - the Silicon Valley equivalent of your local state school. When you come rolling in with your heavy car, big wheels and pumping bass, we don't care how much money you say you're worth - we still don't trust your grin when you open the door and say "hop in".

So what's happening to this Valley? Is it as dire a situation as it sometimes seems? Are we really going to end up with four mega-companies: FaceBook, Google, Microsoft and Apple? Because if Google or Microsoft can weasel their way into acquiring Twitter, that's sure how it will seem. If the IPO market continues to be closed, and innovative companies can only knock on doors 1 through 4, that's not a good thing.

I don't claim to have any inside scoop on how big the rock was on that ring you got FriendFeed. I don't know whether you want to keep her a good girl, or lock her away in your closed dungeon. But all I know is that her friends are very scared for her - and we're watching you.

The introduction of the Voice Memos capability on Apple's iPhone was a nice touch. Now, in theory, if I am out and about and don't want to type in a note, I can speak into the Voice Memo and save a short audio clip. The process is also good for recording short snippets of music, or even the babies babbling, if I want to save it as an MP3 file and send it somewhere. But I've been thinking that Apple could be sitting on a much bigger use for this functionality - doing podcasts and interviews, which would take money out of the pockets of services like WebEx and Skype, and into its partner, AT&T.

Apple's iPhone already features a number of calling options once you are connected - including adding a third line, hitting mute, putting the call on speaker, and putting calls on hold. Given the iPhone's parallel option to record audio, why not add a red "Record" button alongside the conversation?

Before privacy and security advocates call foul, I assume it is very simple to have a mandatory introductory audio phrase, like "this call is being recorded", as well as beeps along the way.


Marrying Voice Memos With Phone Calls Should Be Easy
Today's world of podcasting usually deals with a third party hosting service, like Talkshoe, or gathering all parties on a Skype call, while one person manages the process. I think it would be dramatically easier to use the same way you make any other call, and just have Apple do the work of gathering the call into an MP3 file, and making it available in your iTunes for later listening, so you can upload as you please.

In theory, if Apple could enable this "Record" calls functionality, we would only be a few steps away from what could be seen as a panacea, not just for podcasters, but anybody conducting interviews. It shouldn't be too hard for a phone call to take place and to identify words and phrases by phone number (or the Address Book contact) of the person speaking. At that point, you could run the information against a new application, and have the call automatically transcribed. While this may sound like fantasy, the world we live in isn't that far from delivering excellent speech to text functionality. Pointing that tech at a recorded phone call you make on your iPhone shouldn't be that much more difficult.

Let's just turn on the record button and go.

At one time, I thought Favorit was going to be the application that weaned me from Google Reader to consume all my RSS feeds. After Robert Scoble speculated it could be a serious challenger, thanks in part due to aggressive pitching from its author, Nick Halstead, I waited four months, as the product incubated, before I got my hands on it, and when I finally gained access, I was significantly underwhelmed, writing up one of the most negative pieces I've done here on the site - which, in retrospect, wasn't very nice.

Following my write-up, Nick was understandably frustrated, saying he didn't know why he gave me "the time of day", following on with a post titled "Missing the point".

While possible, some things changed after our exchange. First, Favorit came under fire from Duncan Riley and the Inquisitr for what he called "splogging". Second, Nick felt RSS was "dead for the mainstream market" later in 2008, and third, and likely most impactful, his follow-on project, TweetMeme took off like wildfire, riding the bullet train that is Twitter.

In a post issued today, saying "Fav.or.it is Dead, Long Live Favorit", Nick expands, saying:

"TweetMeme became our focus for several reasons, firstly the trend towards status messages (micro-blogging) meant that access to real-time news was becoming a reality and that our aggregation + filtering technologies could be very quickly leveraged to take advantage of it. Secondly, our simple approach to delivering what websites desired in the form of a retweet button very quickly got traction..."

The combination of one product becoming less than everyone anticipated in parallel with one becoming a recognized leader in the real-time search and ranking space made the decision clear, and largely anticipated. That Nick and I tangled over our interpretation at the beginning was unfortunate, but I think we've both learned from it and have grown from the experience.

May Tweetmeme live and see a much better fate.

You might have read some of the recent coverage around Spotify's potential inclusion (or lack thereof) into the iTunes store. You might also have seen the company's term sheets floated about the Web, as the music streaming startup gears up from its limited release to one that could take the globe by storm. But if you live in the US, there is a fairly good chance you haven't actually gotten to try the application, unless you cheated and used a proxy, because to date, it has been limited to European audiences. Well, despite my years-long allegiance to iTunes, and recent signup to Sirius XM satellite radio, I got my hands on a press beta for the US version of Spotify, and it is amazing.


Spotify's Promise: Legal, Free and Instant. All 100% Valid.
Using Spotify is like having hundreds of thousands of crystal-clear music tracks on demand. After downloading the application tonight, I've closed my iTunes and have been powering through Spotify, finding hundreds of tracks from all my favorite bands, including Depeche Mode, Underworld, and Daft Punk, but I was also able to dial back a few decades, uncovering Jesus Jones, INXS, and The B-52s. You name the song, I found it, including rare remixes. And cheating by looking at songs I really liked on Sirius Radio, I even found more obscure artists, including Deadmau5, Kaskade, Kaz James and Kristinia Debarge.


724 Tracks from Armin Van Buuren In Spotify


Drilling in on The B-52s In Spotify
The promise of instant access to seemingly any song on the planet is apparently here. It's jaw dropping.

Like iTunes, Spotify displays the track that is being played, its length, the album name, and artist, and clicking on any of those items displays information about the track, or the artist, including biographical history. Like iTunes, you can hit shuffle and repeat. And like iTunes, the search capability is very good. But unlike iTunes, you don't have to download the music and you don't have to pay for the music - making it more like the subscription services, including Rhapsody and Napster, that have been slaughtered by Apple's iTunes colossus.


Information Society on Display In Spotify


Jesus Jones In Spotify. (Remember them?)
Spotify's service is not "free" per se. The "free" version displays advertising between songs, and to get an ad-free experience, you would need to pay (at least in the UK) a British pound for a 24-hour day pass, or 10 British pounds for a month. I haven't seen what the US rates will be, but the version I'm using (no doubt the 'press' version) hasn't encountered an ad yet - just pure, clear, music.

If I'm Apple, and I see the Spotify application heading for me like a freight train, I would try to say the application competes with existing features of iTunes. You don't want to let a huge potential competitor in the front door. But if you look at Spotify like they did Sirius XM Radio, which was approved, it's essentially the same story, only instead of dedicated radio stations, you've got individual songs and artists by the bucketload.

I wish, similarly, that I had a "bucketload" of invites to hand out to get you into a theoretical Spotify beta, but I don't. All I have is my copy - and it's fantastic. When it lands here in the US, it's got the potential to be an amazing hit. I just hope people aren't so cheap as to not pay if presented the opportunity. I'm always willing to pay for quality, and that's exactly what we've got here.