This morning Google switched on real time conversations on Gmail, mobile, and Google Profiles. The product got the name Google Buzz.

As the former product manager and someone who made the decision to sell a startup and move his family halfway around the world to build said product, it’s an emotional moment to see it out in the wild.

Of course, I left a good while ago and credit is due in its entirety to the team at Google.

What everyone wants to know now is, will Buzz disrupt Facebook and Twitter? Or did it flame up thanks to Google hype, only to smolder away unloved and unused like Wave?

Here’s what I suspect. Although Google’s getting into the game late, the timing may be just right. The game is no longer just about “what are you doing”. As microblogging has become more popular, the stream has become more busy, and people are getting tired of sifting through the noise. So, now that pretty much everyone has shown up for the party, the value is moving to discovery, context, and relevance. The question we increasingly feel our social inbox should answer better is: “given what you know about me, look at everything I subscribe to, and show me only the updates I care about most right here, right now.” In one word: Search. And who has the advantage there? We know who.

Second, look at what’s happening to usage. You don’t need a crystal ball to know that mobile is becoming the primary (in some cases the only) interface to daily social media. Facebook’s and Twitter’s mobile clients? Let’s be straight, they’re lame feed scrollers compared to what they could be. Nobody has come even close to harnessing the full power of mobile. Which of the three companies has its own mobile platform: Facebook, Twitter, or Google? Again, we know who.

Third, note that Buzz is built to be compatible with open standards that enable the distributed production and processing of real time updates. In fact, where standards didn’t exist, ones were set in place, with the philosophy to enable developers working with existing web technologies to apply them with minimal effort. This could be the most significant contribution of the entire project in the long run.

Google’s weakness historically has been in that it hasn’t “gotten sharing right”. If there’s one thing I’m interested to watch get used in real life it’s the sharing model, which allows sharing of both public and private content in the same stream. Having different privacy settings coexist intuitively in an interface is one of the trickiest design challenges there is. A lot of time was spent tuning this, and I’m pretty optimistic about the result.

When the Jaiku team joined Google, we were tasked with doing “something cool with mobile and social”. Teemu mashed up Jaiku and Google Maps on the mobile in a couple of weeks, but we couldn’t use it because it was built on Jaiku’s, not Google’s social graph.

The problem at the time was that there was no Google-wide social graph. There was no sharing model or friend groups. There was no working activity stream back-end. There were not even URLs for people. All this had to be built, and parts of the whole (such as Google Profiles and Latitude) were shipped incrementally along the way. The archstone that connects everything together is Buzz in Gmail.

The task has been truly herculean, and I have deep respect for the engineers and designers who pulled it through over literally years of iteration and countless changes. I left before Buzz shipped, but learned a lot of valuable lessons about building something that big.

Did we get it right? It would be great to hear your thoughts.

PS. If you read just one thing on Buzz, make it Tim O’Reilly’s post from earlier today. Tim sees what Google is doing (and should be doing) with Buzz better than any other commentator I’ve seen so far.

Yesterday we flipped the switch and moved Jaiku to App Engine. Today we open sourced the Jaiku code base. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code. Anyone can now set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.

The same day Jaiku was migrated, Dave Winer wrote that it’s time to break out and distribute microblogs. I agree. There should be lots of platforms, and they should talk to each other. Jaiku doesn’t do that yet, but now there’s a decent chance that it soon will.

Andy‘s put a lot of work into this open source release. A few hours ago he posted a note to developers in the JaikuEngine-discuss group. Here’s a snippet from that note.

The source lives at http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine and is reported to be eagerly looking forward to hearing from us all. We have received the following letter:

Dearest JaikuEngine users, contributors,

Wow! It's great to be free.

I'm really looking forward to accepting your patches and keeping you all up  to date on my plans.

So far I've set up a mailing list, jaikuengine-discuss@googlegroups.com and over the weekend I expect to be getting set up to receive and review patches.

If you are really itching to send something in before then, just make a new issue in the issue tracker at http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine and attach your code.

Working together I'm sure we can come up with some really fun stuff and maybe even do our part to make the world a better place.

I will send more updates soon.

JaikuEngine

Today Apple announced DRM-free music on iTunes.

It’s curious to note where this leaves Spotify, a company that I believe is positioned to become a serious iTunes competitor at least in certain geographical areas.

What does going drm-free tell us about Apple’s future direction for iTunes? It shows that Apple is pushing hard to break the locks that are keeping it from exploiting the full value of iTunes’ impressive catalog. If this spirit continues, it’s not unthinkable that a little way down the road iTunes will look a lot like Spotify.

Spotify makes an iTunes-like music app that differs from iTunes in that the music is freely accessible for listening, but the user can’t (as of today) download copies of tracks to their hard drive.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has explained his strategy is to simply provide access to music. He sees Spotify as the supplier of social objects for other social networks.

“We think music data is social objects, and we focus on building tools around them. We don’t necessarily want to be a social network ourselves. That’s also a hint on the future,”

he wrote in a thread on Jaiku earlier today.

iTunes’ per-item sales and Spotify’s freemium subscriptions may seem like competing business models.

However, the two are not mutually exclusive. Spotify could start to offer downloads, essentially turning into iTunes.

Similarly, Apple is not going to abandon sales of music tracks in favor of subscriptions to a streaming service. But it could easily add a free, ad-supported streaming mode (and an ad-free subscription mode) to help drive its per-item sales — essentially turning into Spotify.

If iTunes were to offer free access, where would that leave Spotify? Remember, iTunes killed another promising startup Odeo by becoming a podcasting platform…

Spotify’s success against iTunes is determined by how well it can exploit the fact that as both an online distributor and device manufacturer Apple wears two hats. As a result, the iTunes store is not available on non-Apple portable players (save for the Motorola rokr failure).

The interests of Apple the device manufacturer and Apple the online distributor are fundamentally in conflict. It’s in the iPod unit’s interest to keep iTunes proprietary to the iPod; whereas the iTunes music store would increase its sales significantly if it shipped on third-party devices like Nokia phones the way it does on the iPhone today.

In the end this is a business equation to Apple. As long as Apple makes more money selling iPods, iTunes is likely to stay proprietary. But if the iTunes store were to outgrow the iPod business into the company’s de facto cash cow, or the iPod started to lose market share, Apple could ditch the iPod and integrate iTunes with other portables.

It’s in Spotify’s interest, therefore, that the iPod does well but not too well. Apple has to be compelled to keep iTunes proprietary, but worldwide sales of music players has to be made up of a significant percentage of other manufacturers who want iTunes but are left to look for other options.

As long as iTunes remains locked into the iPod, Spotify has a shot at becoming the de facto music distribution platform for the rest of the world. Of course it’ll face tough competition from other proprietary and open initiatives.

This year Google handed out limited-edition unlocked G1’s to employees as christmas presents. I picked mine up a few hours ago.

Although I’ve been carrying various versions of the handset for over a year now, it was a new experience to open one of my own from a real consumer box.

The G1 is very close to a post I wrote 3 years ago on the missing disruptive mobile device. (Thank you, Matt Jones, for reminding me about it. I hope the day comes when you emerge from behind the camouflage and return to blog for us once more).

While the power of the G1 in terms of features and functionality is unparalleled, the basic user experience is still a bit stuttery and not yet as velvet-smooth as flow on the iPhone.

If they were Argentine tango dancers, switching from the iPhone to the G1 would be the equivalent of pairing up with a beginner after coasting smoothly with a top dame or don.

This particular beginner is a fast learner though. It also has social object-producing capabilities none of the others have.

The top Android app lists by Gizmodo and TechCrunch seem a bit dated. If you’re an Android user or following the developer circuit, let’s hear from you! What apps should I be installing?

This week Google Reader updated its Shared Items so users can share them with a hand-picked friend group. Up until now sharing on Reader has bee limited to Google Talk chat contacts.

From the perspective of object-centered sociality it’s easy to understand why many Reader users asked for a separate list. On Talk, people connect with folks they want to chat with. The social object there is the chat conversation. Reader took a different object, a blog article, and made it shareable. Many people’s chat networks didn’t map perfectly to their blog-reading networks, which the Reader team recognized.

A part of my job has been to make it easier to share things on Google, so it’s been great to work with the Reader team and see them launch this update. It gives users greater control over the audience they share with and consume from.

By the way, one of the details worth noting is that sharing on Reader can be asymmetrical. That is, you can let someone see your shared items without necessarily having to subscribe to theirs. Personally I find this really useful. I’m fine sharing articles with a broad audience, but following everyone back would be drinking from the firehose.

I prefer to follow a smaller group of people who are good at picking up things in a space that I’m interested in. That tends to change depending on what I’m working on, so it’s useful to be able to update subscriptions without affecting who can see my shared stuff.

Congrats to the Reader team!

Tonight we demonstrated Jaiku running on Google App Engine, a new development environment that enables anyone to develop Web services that can scale up to millions of users using Google’s massive server infrastructure.

The announcement was made a short while ago at a campfire event here on the Google campus in Mountain View. Robert Scoble broadcasted live video from the event using his Nokia phone; a production-quality video will be posted in a few hours on the Google App Engine site.

Jaiku will be fully deployed on Google App Engine in the near future. More details on the Jaikido blog.

An 18-year old boy shot to death 8 and wounded 12 in a high school in Jokela, Finland this week. The police found the shooter on the school corridor after he had shot himself in the head with his handgun. He died later in a hospital. One of the killed students was a 25-year old single mother completing her second year of high school. She left behind two children, aged 3 and 5.

As nowadays tends to be the case, the news first spread across the Internet. Some of the immediate commentary took place over IRC, and there’s a thread on Jaiku that documents the unfolding of the events pretty much as they were happening.  One of the comments in the Jaiku thread is a quote from the IRC chat: "there’s a boy on the other [IRC] channel whose younger sister is still over there in the classroom."

Before taking action the shooter posted a total of 89 videos on YouTube, some of them featuring Nazi imagery. The videos have subsequently been taken offline.

Damn it. Someone should have seen what was coming.

On October 9th, two weeks ago, our company was acquired by Google. Loic asked me about it on camera at Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday.

A few days after the acquisition we were on a plane to San Francisco, and now, as we’re starting the second week in our new roles, most of the new faces have been met and we’re able to find the way to our desks in the morning. It’s time to focus on implementing the stuff that we came here to do.

To me Google is a chance to work as part of the largest concentration of software engineering talent in existence, especially a few individuals whose work has been instrumental to my own work and thinking lately; and, if we succeed, profoundly change the Web. Other facets of life play into the picture too. Some of my best friends live here, and two of Ulla’s key collaborators are in the Bay Area.

Still, it’s a change. Our families are 10 hours away. Moving with a baby is different from traveling as a couple. In Helsinki our company had the luxury of total obscurity. Suddenly, at Google, it feels like everyone’s eyes are fixed on what the company will do next.

By the way, I also turned 30 on Friday. Picasso supposedly once said that it takes a long time to grow young. Looking around, it’s hard to name an environment that could better keep us from growing up.

Today’s FT has a piece on the Blue Monster Reserve, a special wine label created by winery Stormhoek for Microsoft and its employees. The label on the bottle features a sharp-toothed blue creature and slogan "Microsoft – change the world or go home."

Since its inception by cartoonist Hugh McLeod, the cartoon has been adopted by microsofties as a symbol of the company’s and it’s people’s aspiration to innovate. I’ve heard Microsoft employees refer to it as the company’s unofficial mascot.

McLeod has a knack for looking at the world through the lenses of object-centered sociality. “Wine is a social object, and so is the Blue Monster: they both inspire conversation,” he is quoted saying in the article.

Besides the fact that Hugh is a killer cartoonist, he has helped traditional entrepreneurs turn tailored suits, and now wine, into social objects. This makes him a valuable of envoy or persona grata who traverses the digital divide which still too often cuts Web geeks off from the rest of the world.

It’s good to see theory brought to life in practice this way.

Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) has put together an influential group who yesteday posed a proposal for a Bill of Rights for "users of the social Web." Read Joseph’s post about it.

I like the way the traces users generate is now increasingly getting described as an activity stream. There’s a shift taking place from fixed pages to a flow of actions on objects.

Here’s the text:

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington
September 4, 2007

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their
  friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service,
  using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their
  site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup
  within the service.