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If you follow Steve Gillmor you know he loved a feature that used to be in Twitter, that he called Track. It let you ask Twitter to shove you real-time info. It was turned off as Twitter tried to deal with its scale problem.

But now Twitter is bringing back real-time streams. I’m using a pre-release version of TweetDeck that shows tweets coming into its columns in real time. It moves fast.

And that’s the problem. We all want to follow more and more people but that means we are less and less likely to keep up with the people and information we really want to keep up with.

So, how do we keep up?

Well, Nick Halstead has an answer he calls DataSift. He called it “track on steroids” when he first told me about it. I immediately got excited and turned on my camera.

It is in final stages of development, he told me, and will be available to developers in the next month. Nick says that Twitter worked with him on its development and it sounds exciting, there’s more on the Datasift blog. Listen to the video, but here’s how Nick pitched it to me in Skype before I turned on the camera:

datasift – takes the twitter firehose – and gives you twitter lists for content
____
its twitter track on steriods
____
so alerts/analytics/and API access to take real-time streams of the curated content.
____
built around a whole new programming language to tell it what content you want to extract
____
so for example,  - twitter.user.follow_count > 5000
would give you a stream of all the updates from twitter users with more than 5000 followers
____
- twitter.geo GEO_RADIUS “51.500789,-0.142264:10.0″ AND twitter.text CONTAINS “coffee”  AND twitter.sentiment > 75 looks for people in a 10km range of SF – that mention cofee – and are being very positive about it
____
looks for people in a 10km range of SF – that mention cofee – and are being very positive about it any data that is contained in a tweet (of which there are like 30 different fields) can be filtered against
____
any data that is contained in a tweet (of which there are like 30 different fields) can be filtered against, including annotations

Original post by Robert Scoble

If you follow Steve Gillmor you know he loved a feature that used to be in Twitter, that he called Track. It let you ask Twitter to shove you real-time info. It was turned off as Twitter tried to deal with its scale problem.

But now Twitter is bringing back real-time streams. I’m using a pre-release version of TweetDeck that shows tweets coming into its columns in real time. It moves fast.

And that’s the problem. We all want to follow more and more people but that means we are less and less likely to keep up with the people and information we really want to keep up with.

So, how do we keep up?

Well, Nick Halstead has an answer he calls DataSift. He called it “track on steroids” when he first told me about it. I immediately got excited and turned on my camera.

It is in final stages of development, he told me, and will be available to developers in the next month. Nick says that Twitter worked with him on its development and it sounds exciting, there’s more on the Datasift blog. Listen to the video, but here’s how Nick pitched it to me in Skype before I turned on the camera:

datasift – takes the twitter firehose – and gives you twitter lists for content
____
its twitter track on steriods
____
so alerts/analytics/and API access to take real-time streams of the curated content.
____
built around a whole new programming language to tell it what content you want to extract
____
so for example,  - twitter.user.follow_count > 5000
would give you a stream of all the updates from twitter users with more than 5000 followers
____
- twitter.geo GEO_RADIUS “51.500789,-0.142264:10.0″ AND twitter.text CONTAINS “coffee”  AND twitter.sentiment > 75 looks for people in a 10km range of SF – that mention cofee – and are being very positive about it
____
looks for people in a 10km range of SF – that mention cofee – and are being very positive about it any data that is contained in a tweet (of which there are like 30 different fields) can be filtered against
____
any data that is contained in a tweet (of which there are like 30 different fields) can be filtered against, including annotations

UPDATE: Nick has more on his personal blog about the new Twitter button feature, and yet more, along with a video, on the DataSift blog.

Original post by Robert Scoble

Last week I finally got to visit one of the companies that’s getting a lot of attention inside the location-based service world. No, it’s not Foursquare or Gowalla. It’s SimpleGeo, headquartered in Boulder, CO.

But one thing I’m interested in is why all these services don’t share data. You know, TripIt doesn’t talk with Google Maps which doesn’t talk with Foursquare which doesn’t talk with Gowalla which doesn’t talk with Bing Maps which doesn’t talk with Trapster which doesn’t talk with my running and cycling apps which don’t talk with Waze which doesn’t talk with Glympse and on and on and on.

In the interview and tour with SimpleGeo’s CEO (SimpleGeo plays intermediary for companies trying to build location-based services) he gives a good explanation of why these companies haven’t gotten along:

1. Their databases describe locations differently, so matching databases is hard.
2. The companies they are building on top of, like Navtek, have contracts that forbid a lot of databases being built on top of them.
3. The really useful data, like real-time views into what restaurants your friends are eating at, is very valuable so companies tend to want to keep that to themselves.

These are tough problems and is why the location-based industry feels a lot like online services felt in the late 1980s: lots of data silos, but no way yet to build common interfaces that join these together. We all know that the web came along in 1994 and fixed that. When will the same thing happen to the industry that Foursquare and Gowalla are leading now? I have a feeling SimpleGeo will play a big role in that and that we’ll be seeing a lot more of its CEO, Matt Galligan.

As to the tour of the office, neat to see how they are joining offices together with videoconferencing systems. If you are starting a startup or are trying to work with a remote team, you might get some ideas by what SimpleGeo is doing in its offices.

Original post by Robert Scoble

Last week I finally got to visit one of the companies that’s getting a lot of attention inside the location-based service world. No, it’s not Foursquare or Gowalla. It’s SimpleGeo, headquartered in Boulder, CO.

But one thing I’m interested in is why all these services don’t share data (I wrote about that in Techcrunch recently). You know, TripIt doesn’t talk with Google Maps which doesn’t talk with Foursquare which doesn’t talk with Gowalla which doesn’t talk with Bing Maps which doesn’t talk with Trapster which doesn’t talk with my running and cycling apps which don’t talk with Waze which doesn’t talk with Glympse and on and on and on.

In the interview and tour with SimpleGeo’s CEO (SimpleGeo plays intermediary for companies trying to build location-based services) he gives a good explanation of why these companies haven’t gotten along:

1. Their databases describe locations differently, so matching databases is hard.
2. The companies they are building on top of, like Navtek, have contracts that forbid a lot of databases being built on top of them.
3. The really useful data, like real-time views into what restaurants your friends are eating at, is very valuable so companies tend to want to keep that to themselves.

These are tough problems and is why the location-based industry feels a lot like online services felt in the late 1980s: lots of data silos, but no way yet to build common interfaces that join these together. We all know that the web came along in 1994 and fixed that. When will the same thing happen to the industry that Foursquare and Gowalla are leading now? I have a feeling SimpleGeo will play a big role in that and that we’ll be seeing a lot more of its CEO, Matt Galligan.

As to the tour of the office, neat to see how they are joining offices together with videoconferencing systems. If you are starting a startup or are trying to work with a remote team, you might get some ideas by what SimpleGeo is doing in its offices.

Original post by Robert Scoble

Last week in Boulder, Colorado, we saw a ton of cool startups but many of them didn’t make products consumers can go into a store and buy. GearBox, though, is selling robotic balls that will cost about $50.

Now, what’s cool about a robotic ball beyond their opening pitch of “play with our balls?”

Well, you use a smart phone to tell the ball where to roll, watch the video I shot to see how the ball works. That alone is fun, but is sheer delight for cats or babies.

But they went further than just the obvious use cases. The robot inside the ball is actually a pretty open platform that you can use to build other kinds of devices. You can also program it to do different things with a couple of lines of code thanks to its API. They’ve already held hack days to see what developers might want to do with their balls.

Anyway, the video is fun to watch as they demo it to a bunch of venture capitalists (Jason Calacanis is seen in the background checking out this startup’s balls). They were all in town to see demos from Techstars companies. More on Techstars later this week as I get more of the cool startup videos I shot in Boulder.

I’m buying one. I think they’ll be the hot Christmas toy for geeks this Christmas.

Original post by Robert Scoble

I love getting an in-depth look at cool new technology, but even better I love getting to know some of the great technologists that have done amazing things in the industry.

This video has a little bit of both. Jean-Marie Hullot worked for years for Steve Jobs as CTO at NeXT and at Apple. He’s played key roles (he asked me not to tell you just how key) in the development of major products at both companies, including the iPhone.

But lately he’s been following his other passions: photography and iPad applications. Yesterday he released a really cool new app: Fotopedia’s Heritage. He calls it an endless photo book. It shows photos from World Heritage sites around the world (more than 800 of them) and has a unique interface and way to navigate around them. They are good photos because they were community curated and the images picked are ones that have liberal Creative Commons licenses.

I love the app. Why? Because it lets me dream about traveling to places around the world. It also lets me show my kids different historic sites around the world and take them there without having the expensive travel. It’s like a new kind of atlas with thousands of photos at your fingertips.

Anyway, he came over on a Saturday evening and spent time showing me around the app. If you stay until the end of the 35 minute interview he even tells some fun Steve Jobs stories. For more info, see the Techcrunch review of the app.

Original post by Robert Scoble

Everytime I fly I look at who is sitting next to me and wonder “I wonder what he/she does?”

Last week on the way to Boulder a guy was sitting next to me and he had a Dell laptop with Windows 7 loaded, and was doing Outlook email. I thought to myself “I bet he works for Microsoft.”

Turns out he was. It was Eric Waldman, who does licensing for Bing Maps.

We talked for the next couple of hours about the industry, and what he sees as the good things and problems. Talked about how Navteq and other companies control a lot of the data that you see in Mapquest, Google Maps, and on Bing and how Microsoft works with those companies to build unique data (Navteq’s cameras, for instance, are actually built by Microsoft and Microsoft shares a license for some of that data with Navteq).

He told me a story of how Microsoft was doing something that had never been done before: they are flying planes over nearly every inch of the United States in the next 18 months. Already 10% done. The previous “all USA” flight image gathering exercise took 10 years, he told me. There’s immense pressure on mapping teams, he told me, to always keep its data up to date.

He also made sure to point out that Microsoft’s on-car cameras are sharper than the ones Google is using and that Bing Maps includes at least four different imaging types: on road photos, 45-degree low-altitude aerial photos, high altitude plane photos, and satellite photos.

You can see that all when you visit a map of the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance. Compare to Google Maps of the same area and you’ll see that Microsoft is way ahead in imagery.

I still like the usability of Google’s Maps better, and Google doesn’t force me to download some plugin to see all of its imagery like Microsoft does, but that’s a little nit of mine. After installing Silverlight I see that Microsoft Maps has glorious imagery that makes Google’s imagery look lame (varies from location-to-location).

Anyway, all that high res imagery takes a lot of storage space. In the parking lot they built a sizeable data center that holds five petabytes of storage and a ton of machines in a small shipping container that basically is the kind of thing you see on the back of an 18-wheel truck. I was lucky enough to get a peek inside and a look at that, which I’m sharing here. The photo above is a picture inside the truck. Ever been surrounded by five petabytes of storage? It’s loud. Inside that truck they process all the imagery that comes in from cars and planes around the world.

In a separate audio interview after viewing the truck, you hear some of the details of what the Bing Mapping team does in Boulder, CO.

An early version of Microsoft’s aerial camera, that they call “the ultra cam” is sitting in the lobby:

Industry insiders know that Apple is working on its own maps. What will they look like? What kind of imagery data is Apple capturing? I’m hearing rumors that Apple will release its mapping technology by the end of the year, we’ll see if that happens, but Microsoft told me that the investment they’ve made in making Bing Maps runs into many hundreds of millions of dollars. As one of the team members said in the audio interview there aren’t many companies that can do that.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this small look into Microsoft’s Bing Mapping team’s lair. Which maps do you like best?

Original post by Robert Scoble

Everytime I fly I look at who is sitting next to me and wonder “I wonder what he/she does?”

Last week on the way to Boulder a guy was sitting next to me and he had a Dell laptop with Windows 7 loaded, and was doing Outlook email. I thought to myself “I bet he works for Microsoft.”

Turns out he was. It was Eric Waldman, who does licensing for Bing Maps.

We talked for the next couple of hours about the industry, and what he sees as the good things and problems. Talked about how Navteq and other companies control a lot of the data that you see in Mapquest, Google Maps, and on Bing and how Microsoft works with those companies to build unique data (Navteq’s cameras, for instance, are actually built by Microsoft and Microsoft shares a license for some of that data with Navteq).

He told me a story of how Microsoft was doing something that had never been done before: they are flying planes over nearly every inch of the United States in the next 18 months. Already 10% done. The previous “all USA” flight image gathering exercise took 10 years, he told me. There’s immense pressure on mapping teams, he told me, to always keep its data up to date.

He also made sure to point out that Microsoft’s on-car cameras are sharper than the ones Google is using and that Bing Maps includes at least four different imaging types: on road photos, 45-degree low-altitude aerial photos, high altitude plane photos, and satellite photos.

You can see that all when you visit a map of the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance. Compare to Google Maps of the same area and you’ll see that Microsoft is way ahead in imagery.

I still like the usability of Google’s Maps better, and Google doesn’t force me to download some plugin to see all of its imagery like Microsoft does, but that’s a little nit of mine. After installing Silverlight I see that Microsoft Maps has glorious imagery that makes Google’s imagery look lame (varies from location-to-location).

Anyway, all that high res imagery takes a lot of storage space. In the parking lot they built a sizeable data center that holds five petabytes of storage and a ton of machines in a small shipping container that basically is the kind of thing you see on the back of an 18-wheel truck. I was lucky enough to get a peek inside and a look at that, which I’m sharing here. The photo above is a picture inside the truck. Ever been surrounded by five petabytes of storage? It’s loud. Inside that truck they process all the imagery that comes in from cars and planes around the world.

In a separate audio interview after viewing the truck, you hear some of the details of what the Bing Mapping team does in Boulder, CO.

An early version of Microsoft’s aerial camera, that they call “the ultra cam” is sitting in the lobby:

Industry insiders know that Apple is working on its own maps. What will they look like? What kind of imagery data is Apple capturing? I’m hearing rumors that Apple will release its mapping technology by the end of the year, we’ll see if that happens, but Microsoft told me that the investment they’ve made in making Bing Maps runs into many hundreds of millions of dollars. As one of the team members said in the audio interview there aren’t many companies that can do that.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this small look into Microsoft’s Bing Mapping team’s lair. Which maps do you like best?

Original post by Robert Scoble

By now you know that Flipboard is one of my favorite new companies of 2010 and, while they’ve pretty much caught up to the initial demands on their servers, spent two weeks just getting slammed with new adopters. Mike McCue, the CEO there who has seen great Silicon Valley success (he sold TellMe to Microsoft for $800 million) told me he has never seen anything like it.

But compare that to Wowd, which came out yesterday. Here’s my video on Wowd:

Why didn’t Wowd get a huge amount of adoption? It’s counter intuitive. Flipboard is only usable on the iPad, which has sold a small fraction of the numbers of Macintosh and Windows computers are out there. Wowd was aiming at a far bigger potential market, but fell flat. Why?

Now part of the reason could be it got a poor review from ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez. But as I read Sarah I noticed a bias, here, let me see if you can see it too: “But dealing with the first desktop app I’ve installed since TweetDeck reminds me of why I love the cloud – the processing power required is dealt with on their servers, not mine.”

I feel the same way! I +hate+ installing software. So much so that I almost didn’t install Wowd.

But, wait, I have 300+ apps on my iPhone and iPad. So, there’s a disconnect there.

I noticed this a few weeks ago when I was flying. I sat next to two guys. One had an iPad. It was loaded with apps that didn’t exist a year ago. The other was using a Windows XP machine. It didn’t have a single app that didn’t exist a year ago.

So, yesterday, I dug into my feelings about installing software.

Windows and Macintosh machines bring a lot of baggage to the table that make it mentally exhausting to install software. Here’s some of the things that were going through my mind when I installed Wowd yesterday:

1. Can I uninstall this easily? I’ve recently tried to clean up apps on my Mac. It took quite a while to find all the places apps hide crap.
2. Will it screw up my machine? I lived through many years of installing stuff on my Windows machines to watch them get slower, or start having crashes, or worse.
3. Will I fall in love with this app and want it on all my machines? (Installing software on all my machines is a pain in the behind).
4. Will I need to maintain this app in the future and find updates for it, or will it get updated itself?
5. Did the developers do something nasty to my machine and are they ethical about privacy and all that stuff (seriously, how many people install apps that report data back to some server that they aren’t aware of, etc)?

Then I thought back to Flipboard. I didn’t have any of these fears with that app. Why not?

1. Uninstalling an app on an iPad just requires you to hold your finger down on the app and clicking an “x.” It’s gone and there’s no little pieces left around.
2. I’ve loaded hundreds of apps on my iPad and it hasn’t gotten slower.
3. Loading an iPad app on all three of our iPads is much easier than installing it on three separate laptops.
4. Apps update easily on the iPad via the iTunes store.
5. Apps are approved by Apple so if an app does something nasty I can make a huge deal about how Apple is evil, etc.

This leads to promiscuous adoption. Some weekends I’ve loaded 50 or more apps on my iPhone or iPad to try them out. Heck, the only retardant to adoption is paying the app fee and I’ve often said “it’s only a latte” while trying out an app and more than not I come away with something much more valuable than a latte at the local coffee shop.

I’ve been asking around and both startups and big companies are telling me they are noticing the same thing. iPhone and iPad users are installing a lot more apps and are installing new things at a far greater rate than people who have Windows or Macintosh machines.

This has deep implications for where VC’s will invest in the future. I’m actually shocked that Wowd got funded with its approach of installing software on machines. It’s one of the few exceptions I’ve seen get funded this year that has taken that approach.

Anyway, do I have an opinion on Wowd? Yes. It isn’t ready for me yet. After installing I hit a bug (they are fixing it) that keeps their system from working well with large-friend accounts. Now that I have it installed I’ll try it again when they get an update out.

What does Wowd do? Help you filter your Facebook stream (Twitter coming soon) so that you can see more of the things you find valuable in your stream. Interesting idea, that’s somewhat what Flipboard does too (which is why I took the interview, because I’m looking for companies that will help us filter the noise out of our social streams).

But if I ran Wowd, I’d go server side so that people don’t need to install any software. That’s a LOT of baggage to overcome. It also makes Flipboard appear brilliant for going iPad only.

What do you think?

Original post by Robert Scoble

You know Siri. Back in February I said that if you miss Siri you’ll miss the future of the Web.

Apple didn’t miss it. Just a few days after that blog ran Apple bought Siri for somewhere around $200 million.

It is the 2010 startup success of the year.

But here’s the first part of the story behind the success from the people actually involved: the venture capitalists and the exec at one of the most important research labs in Silicon Valley, SRI International (it’s where the mouse was invented). The second part of the video will be up Thursday on Building43.

This is the most interesting conversation I’ve had so far this year about a startup. Some things you’ll learn:

1. Why this company is so strategic to Apple’s future.
2. What happened when Apple called.
3. Why this company is a continuation of work that Douglas Engelbart started in the 1960s.
4. What the secret sauce is behind Siri.
5. Why the venture capitalists backed this company (they got $10.5 million right before Apple bought them).

This is the most interesting conversation I’ve had all year, hope you enjoy.

Original post by Robert Scoble

Listen to the story of Aye Moah. She grew up in one of the poorest countries on earth. She shouldn’t have many opportunities. Yet here she was, talking with me at a Silicon Valley party after the Always On conference. The route she took? She went to MIT. How did she get in? Was one of the top-scoring students in Burma. One of the top 10, in fact. Then she scored a perfect 800 on the SAT. That’s a cool story alone.

But now keep listening. She is one of the top talented people in the world. The kind that help start companies that hire thousands of people.

Yet she can’t work here in the United States.

Let me get this right. One of the smartest people in an entire country gets an invite to come to the United States to study. Does so. Gets a great education from one of the top universities in the world. And we can’t employ her because of our screwed up immigration laws.

Shame on America.

Even if she were to get a work visa, it probably would be from a bigger company that would treat her poorly (I keep hearing stories of how immigrants are treated like crap and can’t leave, otherwise their work visa will be yanked). These laws are unjust and not American. Worse yet they are anti innovation because it’s these smart, highly educated, people who will start the next companies. It isn’t lost on me that eBay was started by an Iranian.

But, standing next to her was Ronald Mannak. He is an entrepreneur who lost everything he owned. In the Netherlands if your company fails and you’ve taken venture capital you are personally liable for the losses. So, Ronald owes the Dutch government $200,000 and lost everything, even his fridge, he told us.

Here in Silicon Valley it’s different. We let you fail, multiple times, and you aren’t personally liable to the venture capitalists.

So, here, in one video, you have a demonstration of how American policy is both brilliant and idiotic at the same time.

It’s amazing how anti immigrant we’ve become. Stupidly so, too.

This is why I support the Startup Visa project and urge you to support it too.

Original post by Robert Scoble

Jorge Lorenzo is on top of the world right now. He’s a 23-year-old motorbike racer from Mallorca in Spain and is atop the standings in the MotoGP circuit. But he has a problem. Teammate Valentino Rossi has a better brand. Mostly because Rossi is older, has won season after season, and has cultivated thousands of fans. When I saw Rossi speak last year at Indianapolis fans were literally crying for a chance to touch him. Seriously. Most of us have never seen celebrity like this close up. Photo of Lorenzo’s Twitter sign on his bike taken by my producer Rocky Barbanica — we got a tour yesterday of his pits and got a chance to see the Twitter bike up close and personal. More of my photos are up on Flickr.

But the MotoGP sport has a problem. If Rossi can’t race anymore, like he couldn’t for a month this year because he broke his leg, ticket sales go down. A lot.

So, the Fiat/Yamaha team is trying something new: Twitter.

While Rossi disdains talking with fans online, Lorenzo welcomes it. Posting photos, doing his own tweets, and meeting with fans one-on-one which, over time, will make him a world-wide brand. He also does things to get his Twitter fans to talk, like after the race yesterday he donned a space suit and re-enacted man’s landing on the moon at the top of Laguna Seca’s famous corkscrew turns (last week was the anniversary of the moon landing). Photo by Umberto Schiavella.

But he pushes it further than any other racer on the MotoGP circuit and is including Twitter on his bike (Twitter gets this exposure for free, unlike other sponsors on his bike) and even holding up signs after races asking fans to follow him on Twitter.

Yes, the sport is also using other technologies, like small TV cameras to get fans at home into the race, but every racer is doing that.

Only Lorenzo is really using Twitter in any big way on the track.

I’m noticing this with more and more brands: they are using Twitter to get an edge on their competition in the branding war — I’m seeing more and more “follow us on Twitter signs” in restaurants, malls, and even amusement parks. Are you noticing this too? Question is, does adding Twitter to a brand make it cooler?

To me it does.

Why?

1. It sends a signal to the world that you want to hear from your customers.
2. It sends a signal to the world that you’ll use the latest technology to communicate with them. Many of whom are no longer using email. My son, for instance, rarely uses email to communicate with his friends.
3. It lets you feature your customers. Notice the pictures on Lorenzo’s bike? They are his fans on Twitter. Win-win.
4. It gives your team a way to communicate in one stream all the photos and stuff.
5. It lets you bridge audiences around the world. Look at how he mixes Italian and English together on Tweets.

But what do you think? What are you seeing the bleeding edge brands doing today to find more customers and build more brand loyalty? I wonder what Chris Brogan would say?

Oh, and it wasn’t lost on the team that about 100 people were checked in at the track on Foursquare. How long before Foursquare has some involvement with race and sports brands? I give it a few hours the way Foursquare’s business developer Tristan Walker has been working lately.

Finally, just in case, they are on Flickr at lorenzo99 and has an old-school website plus a Facebook fan page. But the team tells me that Lorenzo likes Twitter the best. He even wants to visit Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to meet his hero, Evan Williams. I bet he gets that dream. Something about him tells me he’s going to be someone we’ll hear from for a long time to come.

Original post by Robert Scoble

I’m seeing lots of tweets saying I caused Flipboard to have a bad first day. Why? Because its servers were overwhelmed and it wasn’t letting new users sign up properly and even existing users, like me, were having trouble getting to the service and getting utility out of it.

Is that my fault? Yes and no. If I were the only one hyping it and if the product didn’t resonate after I hyped it they would have only gotten a few hundred visits. The problem is that Flipboard is the real deal. If you can get in and get it to work it’s a revolutionary product and hundreds, if not thousands, of people on Twitter and blogs said so. The reviews still are coming in and they almost all are positive. That I didn’t do, even if I was the first to tell the Internet about it.

What’s funny is I just hit the Twitter fail whale three times. Twitter is a company that has been around for three years and continues to have scalability and reliability problems yet we all keep using Twitter. It has gotten so commonplace that we sort of accept it, too, even in discussions with venture capitalists who helped fund Twitter, like the conversation I witnessed yesterday with Fred Wilson. He said Twitter was never built right to start with.

I see on iTunes that Flipboard is getting some bad reviews because of this reliability issue. Is it fair to judge a startup badly based on 24 hours of extraordinary growth? Yeah, a little. They could have been better prepared — I sent them plenty of notes telling them they were the best startup I’ve seen so far this year and I kept telling them about reactions of influencers — all which matched my observations.

In fact, when I showed it to famous actor Ashton Kutcher he was so excited about the product (said it was “a revolution in publishing”) he turned to me and begged to be introduced to the company. “I want to invest in this,” he told me. A week later he was, indeed, an investor.

The former head of MTV had the same reaction this weekend.

So they had some warning that their first day would be incredible and see an much larger amount of hype than they would otherwise see.

What’s my failing? I tried to get them to use Rackspace for hosting their service. I failed, they are using another cloud provider. I failed so badly that I couldn’t even convince them to change providers a few months ago when their provider was down when I visited them to get an early look at this company. I think I must take some sales lessons and get retrained. Sigh. But even with Rackspace’s help would we have been able to keep them up? I would like to think so. After all, Rackspace hosted YouTube for its first few years of life and has helped many startups scale.

But this is a world we’ve never seen. Things get faster, bigger, than any time in human history.

The number of people who’ve worked at companies that have seen this kind of growth — all in 24 hours — are almost non-existent. Even experienced entrepreneurs, like Flipboard’s CEO, who started TellMe, which sold to Microsoft for $800 million, have never seen this kind of growth.

I remember back to 1996. ICQ that year released November 1 to 40 people. It took six weeks to get to 65,000 users. I bet Flipboard got close to that in just their first day (I don’t know their numbers, but, heck, a few weeks back I had a VIDEO watched by half a million people in a week, so I bet Flipboard is seeing those kinds of numbers based on the hypestorm that I see continuing around this company).

It is a new world and this new world is bumpy.

Anyway, just my way of saying to cut a team of 10 people who’ve done something extraordinary some slack. No one else has launched a company to this kind of hype, er, adoption, and stayed up as well as Flipboard has. At least none that I know of. Do you know of someone who has had a better first day?

Onward for all of us. Flipboard is working hard (its developers are on Twitter and I can see them responding to customers as to what they are doing to get and stay up) and I’m back on the street looking around the tech industry for the next hot startup.

Got one? Email me. scobleizer@gmail.com

Update. I just added a photo of Flipboard’s team to this post. Left to right (forefront folks):
co-founder, Evan Doll
engineer, Troy Brant
engineer, Charles Ying
engineer, Gene Tsai
co-founder, Mike McCue

UPDATE 2: PC Magazine has an interview with Flipboard’s founders, asking for patience.

Original post by Robert Scoble

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Nova Spivak has been debating with me tonight about how much more efficient he feels news readers are if they stream items down like you’ll see on Twitter.com, or in social media clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck bring.

I used to agree with him. It was hard to get me away from Seesmic or Tweetie.

But now? I’m a changed man.

Keep in mind that I read about 19,000 inbound on Twitter alone. On Facebook I have 1,800 friends and on Google Buzz I’m following more than 1,000.

I read a LOT of social media. Heck, in the past year alone I’ve FAVORITED 20,000 tweets! (Not counting the ones I’ve retweeted).

So, I’m always looking to be more productive. Yes, I’ve tried Pulse and I’ve tried lots of other readers (I was one of the first to use NewsGator and Google Reader). But nothing is as productive — for me — as Flipboard is.

I actually measured this. I got about 30% more favorites done in a day using Flipboard than I got done in the same amount of time with a streaming reader. And using Flipboard is 10x more fun!

Why is this?

For that I have to go back to my newspaper design class. I remember that early eye tracking research showed that pages that had a single headline that was twice as big as any other headline were more likely to be read. Same for pages with photos. If you put two photos of equal size on the page, it would be looked at less often, or less completely, than a page that had a photo that was at least twice as big as any other.

I won a newspaper design contest in college because of this — my designs made sure that they included headlines that were twice as big as any other and photos that were twice as big as any other.

This might not seem intuitive, but it is how our brains work and eye track research has proven that over and over again. Some of my favorite reading studies were done by the Poynter institute, here’s one such study.

Notice that having large headlines and photos gives eyes an entry point onto the page.

Now, what’s missing in, say, Seesmic or Tweetdeck? That’s right. Any kind of editorial weighting to the headlines and photos are totally missing. Entry points are gone.

Not all tweets are the same. One about Apple’s financial results SHOULD be bigger and more important than one about what I had for lunch today. In Flipboard, which isn’t always perfect because it’s done by algorithms, there is weight and photos and an attractive design.

I’ve come to realize that we’ve actually gone backward in our news media design in the past few years as we’ve gone away from newspaper and magazine-style layouts and toward streams.

One other thing I’ve noticed: my eyes get less strained after using Flipboard for four straight hours when compared to using Twitter’s iPhone or Android apps, or Seesmic or Tweetdeck style apps. In looking why, it gets back to this weighting. Our brains are awesome pattern recognizers and our brains like it when there’s a clear pattern of “look here first, look here second, look here third.” In streams that pattern is gone completely, other than “look at the newest thing first, then this second newest thing, then this third.” That might seem to be more efficient, but it really is not.

Not to mention that a LOT of what value we get out of the world is photographic or videographic.

On tweets you just get a bit.ly link on most readers. Not in Flipboard. That makes it MUCH more productive.

How about for you? Which do you prefer? Streaming like Seesmic or Tweetdeck? Or paginated like Flipboard?

Original post by Robert Scoble

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Nova Spivak has been debating with me tonight about how much more efficient he feels news readers are if they stream items down like you’ll see on Twitter.com, or in social media clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck bring.

I used to agree with him. It was hard to get me away from Seesmic or Tweetie.

But now? I’m a changed man.

Keep in mind that I read about 19,000 inbound on Twitter alone. On Facebook I have 1,800 friends and on Google Buzz I’m following more than 1,000.

I read a LOT of social media. Heck, in the past year alone I’ve FAVORITED 20,000 tweets! (Not counting the ones I’ve retweeted).

So, I’m always looking to be more productive. Yes, I’ve tried Pulse and I’ve tried lots of other readers (I was one of the first to use NewsGator and Google Reader). But nothing is as productive — for me — as Flipboard is.

I actually measured this. I got about 30% more favorites done in a day using Flipboard than I got done in the same amount of time with a streaming reader. And using Flipboard is 10x more fun!

Why is this?

For that I have to go back to my newspaper design class. I remember that early eye tracking research showed that pages that had a single headline that was twice as big as any other headline were more likely to be read. Same for pages with photos. If you put two photos of equal size on the page, it would be looked at less often, or less completely, than a page that had a photo that was at least twice as big as any other.

I won a newspaper design contest in college because of this — my designs made sure that they included headlines that were twice as big as any other and photos that were twice as big as any other.

This might not seem intuitive, but it is how our brains work and eye track research has proven that over and over again. Some of my favorite reading studies were done by the Poynter institute, here’s one such study.

Notice that having large headlines and photos gives eyes an entry point onto the page.

Now, what’s missing in, say, Seesmic or Tweetdeck? That’s right. Any kind of editorial weighting to the headlines and photos are totally missing. Entry points are gone.

Not all tweets are the same. One about Apple’s financial results SHOULD be bigger and more important than one about what I had for lunch today. In Flipboard, which isn’t always perfect because it’s done by algorithms, there is weight and photos and an attractive design.

I’ve come to realize that we’ve actually gone backward in our news media design in the past few years as we’ve gone away from newspaper and magazine-style layouts and toward streams.

One other thing I’ve noticed: my eyes get less strained after using Flipboard for four straight hours when compared to using Twitter’s iPhone or Android apps, or Seesmic or Tweetdeck style apps. In looking why, it gets back to this weighting. Our brains are awesome pattern recognizers and our brains like it when there’s a clear pattern of “look here first, look here second, look here third.” In streams that pattern is gone completely, other than “look at the newest thing first, then this second newest thing, then this third.” That might seem to be more efficient, but it really is not.

Not to mention that a LOT of what value we get out of the world is photographic or videographic.

On tweets you just get a bit.ly link on most readers. Not in Flipboard. That makes it MUCH more productive.

How about for you? Which do you prefer? Streaming like Seesmic or Tweetdeck? Or paginated like Flipboard?

Original post by Robert Scoble