Dave Winer's Blog

I had a lunch in SF, so I missed the rush of news today.

Scoble called while I was driving east on the Bay Bridge. Apparently he was the only blogger at the press conference. He channeled inquiries from people on Twitter to the participants in the conference, while he captured video live on Kyte. I know a lot of "real" journalists and academics who study journalism don't use Twitter, they should, it's an amazing tool for exchanging fast-breaking information, in other words, news.

Anyway...

Mike Arrington posits: "Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle."

Hmmm.

Imho, Google has a long way to go to build the base of users and developers connected using the new protocol that is the subject of all this chest-thumping. Do they exist in any tangible form? How much of a moving target are they? It's like proclaiming the new owners of A-Rod's contract as the winners of the 2008 World Series. Only in tech, a persistently immature industry, could such an idea be aired seriously (assuming Mike is actually serious).

I hope that the Facebook people, many of whom have never been in the middle of a tech PR war, don't overreact. Me, I've been around this block so many times and it's boring. Let's see some software then I'll let you know if this means anything. But Google is keeping people like me far away, which suggests that there may actually be no "there" there.

continued...