Yesterday a crew ambled into my FM offices from ABC News, setting up quite an array of lights and equipment to shoot an interview. The topic was Google and China. Now, I’m a veteran of these situations, as is my staff, and fortunately the commotion was limited to my office, and the 45 minutes or so of set up happened while many of us were in a meeting.  

When they were ready, I sat down for the conversation and enjoyed my talk with the producer, who was piped in via mobile phone. We talked about many of the nuanced issues involved in this particular story. The crew in the room with me also seemed keen to have an informed dialog. I sensed the piece would be pretty intelligent.

But….instead of nuance, we get a story framed as “a battle of titans” – Google v. China, the death match! “Game on!” is how Diane Sawyer opened the piece. “Who will fire the next shot?!” the reporter asks in conclusion. I’m quoted somewhere in the middle, saying that China employs a large number of Internet police, a well-known fact that I mentioned more as a set up to another point. It all begs the question of why they bothered sending the crew in the first place, but …. at least the major networks are paying attention to the story.

And in a way, that’s really the story here. A private company has pushed a very public and political issue into the minds of several significant constituencies. First and foremost, Google’s move has forced China’s hand, and given those inside the country who may disagree with China’s own policies a clear example of their own leadership’s shortcomings. As the NYT points out today:

China also does not acknowledge to its own people that it censors the Internet to exclude a wide range of political and social topics that its leaders believe could lead to instability. It does not release information on the number of censors it employs or the technology it uses for the world’s most sophisticated Internet firewall. Its 350 million Internet users, many with fast broadband connections, are assured they have the same effectively limitless access to information and communications that the rest of the world enjoys.

Google publicly challenged that stance in January, and reinforced its ideological opposition to China’s policies by finally pulling the plug on its mainland search engine after a failed round of talks with Chinese officials. That forced Chinese leaders to defend their control of the Web…

Thanks to Google’s move, thousands, if not millions, of Chinese now understand the extend to which their own government has been duping them. And those who already knew have a new ally, and perhaps additional courage to continue change from within.

A second significant constituency is the US public. To my mind the US has been lured into complacency about China, forgiving China’s violation of core human rights as a cultural matter best swept under the rug. The main reason? Business! Profit! Huge markets! (Oh, and the massive number of US dollars now controlled by our pals in Beijing). It’s a classic conflict of American values: We are society built on freedom of speech and religion, both of which are brutally controlled by the Chinese government. But we are also a society built on capitalism and the profit motive. It’s clear which one had won in the court of US public opinion – until Google made a decision which forced all of us to think about it in a new light.

A third constituency, related to the first two, are the governments of both the US and China, as well as the executives who run major corporations based in the US. As public awareness and opinion unfolds in both countries, I can imagine shifts in both policy as well as practice in both public and private spheres. We now have an administration whose reflexive approach to China’s moral conflict with American values isn’t to sweep it under the rug, for one.

And if you are running a company that competes with Google in the US, chances are you find yourself in a pretty uncomfortable place this morning – answering to employees, shareholders, and consumers this question: Why can Google practice a values-based approach to business, but you cannot?

Come to think of it, that’s a question that the US government should be asked as well. And inside the government, you can bet it’s already come up.

Meanwhile, news breaks today that Google’s main site was hacked, with its management bio page turned into Chinese characters (see image at left). Hmmm. Petty retaliation? I doubt it. But yet another strange twist to an ongoing tale.

The broadcast is here, you can watch the piece starting at around 9.15. I tried to use Hulu’s vaunted sharing features to embed just a clip, but the company seems to have caved to the TV overlords and disabled it. That’ll be a subject of another rant.

My latest Signal is up over at the FM blog. I had a fun day. From it:  

…As readers know, I’ve declared the “check-in” as the latest field in the Database of Intentions. “Where I am” is a powerful signal, in particular if where you are is a local business that might answer that signal with an offer that engenders loyalty, purchase, or both.

But I’m starting to think that we need to expand the concept of location to more than physical spaces. Why can’t I check-in to a website? An article? A state of mind? An emotion? Or…an object?

Over at FM, we’ve been thinking about that very question, and have been busy turning theory into practice (more on that later). But I got a glimpse of where “the check-in” might be headed today when my pal Seth Goldstein came over to give me a tour of StickyBits.

StickyBits started as a way to attach digital content to physical objects – “tagging” them with a physical sticker emblazoned with a barcode. A slick iPhone or Android app makes it easy – you just slap on the sticker, take a photo of it, and connect the sticker to a web media object in the cloud (for example a video of your kids). Then anyone who sees that sticker can scan it, and see the same object. It’s a great idea for, say, a greeting card company.

But a funny thing happens when you put technology into the hands of real people. Stickbits launched at SXSW, and as William Gibson famously said, the street finds its own use for technology. In the case of StickyBits, people figured they could scan any bar code and attach annotations. And it turns out, there are a hell of a lot of barcodes in our lives every day. And it also turns out, StickyBits supports the use of any barcode as a tagging location.

Cans of coke, bars of chocolate, boxes of Kleenex or breakfast cereal – the tagged items starting pouring in. People were actually checking into brands through the use of that brand’s product….

Today Google Labs posted news that it was playing around with showing hotel prices on Google Maps. From the post:

Google Maps is often one of the first stops travelers make to find and compare hotels. Today we started experimenting with a new feature, visible to a small portion of users, to help make that process even easier by showing specific prices for selected hotel listings.

With this feature, when you search for hotels on Google Maps you’ll be able to enter the dates you plan to stay and see real prices on selected listings.

I can imagine any number of reasons why Google might be “experimenting” with this. As anyone who uses Google knows, hotel listing spam – well OK, not spam, but arbitrage and gaming – is pretty out of control in the main Google listings. Going direct to the hotels and brokers themselves to get pricing data cuts out all that organic result spam, and could create a better experience for Google searchers. Of course, if not done right, it could freak out one of Google’s largest category of AdWords advertisers, the travel industry.

I wonder how they are feeling today upon hearing this news? I have some emails out to find out.

From my rant over at the FM Blog:

Now Microsoft is pushing to become a third major player. And to my mind, the company has a choice to make. No one – not even folks at Microsoft – will dispute the fact that Windows Phone 7, due out in the Fall, is a reboot of sorts, and a clear attempt at creating the kind of platform that Android and iPhone already enjoy. While the system is not yet out, the early buzz is good, but Microsoft stands at a crossroads. In essence, the choice comes down to this: Will Microsoft ape Apple’s approach, or will it take the path of Google?

I fervently hope it will do the second.

Why? Well, we’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we? It didn’t end well for Apple, in terms of market share, when it took a vertically integrated, precious approach to operating systems back in 1984. After Apple changed the computing market with the Mac, Microsoft took the best ideas in Apple’s OS, integrated them into Windows, opened it up for any hardware maker to use, and the rest is history. Apple sued Microsoft, but to no avail. (HTC, anyone?!)

Right now, Google is taking the same approach in phones – Microsoft’s approach! So imagine this observer’s dismay when early news leaked out that instead of out Microsofting Google, Microsoft instead was parroting Apple in its approach to the Windows Phone application store. As far as I can tell, Windows Phone 7 won’t support Flash, either– though the company is promising to fix that later….

The hand is being played out (paidcontent), more as more develops…

Background: Google’s Tortured History With China

Here’s the link for those of you who like to keep up with my media/marketing reading over the weekend.

Each year at the Web 2 Summit, Tim and I try to focus our program on an overarching theme that we believe best sums up the year ahead. This is never easy to do – the event is still eight months away. But this year I feel better than I ever have about our focus, because it’s a return to our roots, as it were.

If you know my work, you know I’m fascinated by the interplay between the entrepreneurial culture of our industry and the giants who have emerged from within it – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, to name a few – as well as those who have joined it from other industries – Comcast, GE, and Newscorp come to mind.

For 2010, Web 2 will focus on the chess game in which all of these companies are now engaged, a battle to gain the upper hand in crucial “points of control” across the Internet Economy. The idea sprang from Tim’s “War for the Web” post last Fall, but we’re taking that riff and broadening it, identifying chokepoints on an increasingly crowded chessboard.    

Fifteen years and two recessions into the commercial Internet, it’s clear that our industry has moved into a new competitive phase – a “middlegame” in the battle to dominate the Internet economy. To understand this shift, we’ll use the Summit’s program to map strategic inflection points across the Internet landscape, identifying key players who are battling to control the services and infrastructure of a websquared world.

The stakes are high. As the Web and the world intertwine through mobile and sensor platforms, the decisions we make – as leaders of this industry, as entrepreneurs, and as consumers – will determine the fundamental architecture of our society.

Will distribution, for example, be locked in, or left open? While the Web was once considered to be an open distribution platform, access to content is increasingly becoming a key point of control. The rise of iTunes and Hulu, the vertical integration of the iPhone and iPad, and the promise (or threat) of paid content have brought the model of free media into question.

Another battle is brewing for control of the social graph. While we’d argue that no one “owns” your social graph, Facebook may beg to differ, at least in practice, and Google has clearly laid down its own gauntlet in the form of Buzz and social search. Related, of course, is control of identity services – will Facebook become the one ring to rule them all? And is that a good thing?

Throughout the program, we’ll be talking to leaders, upstarts, and unexpected new players in these and many other key “points of control.” Payment systems, location services, voice recognition, hardware and mobile platforms, content management, data transport, commerce and advertising ecosystems: We’ll unpack them all.

We’ll look at the calculus behind entrenched platforms like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, of course, but we’ll also feature companies who are changing strategy and moving into new fields of battle. Apple as an advertising channel? Comcast as a content network? Cisco as a social network? Adobe as an online marketing company? And of course, as we do every year, we’ll feature the insurgent upstarts and disruptors who hope to replace them all.

I’m proud of the role that the Web 2 Summit plays, once each year, in gathering leaders of the Internet Economy to debate and determine business strategy. With this year’s program we’re redoubling our focus on this critical discussion. I hope you’ll all join Tim and me this November 15-17 in San Francisco – we look forward to the conversation. Early registration for those of you who have invitations can be done here. If you want to come, simply fill out a request here. See you there!

From my Friday Signal over at FM’s blog:

….It’s a very big year for Microsoft, in terms of the initiatives the company is launching, in particular in the consumer space (its business/commercial space is already cranking out tons of products, but the company’s focus on consumer products has hit a tipping point). Natal, Bing (updated version is coming soon), Windows Phone 7, Office 2010, the company’s cloud initiative (which has sigificant consumer angles)…it’s quite a lot.  

…Recall three of the major trends that I predicted for 2010: One, that someone will create an open gaming platform; two, that Microsoft will take second place in search share (from Yahoo); and three, that we’ll see a major advance in the user interface of the web.

Here’s how Microsoft might address those opportunities, in order: Xbox, Bing, and Natal (not to mention Pivot and stuff like PhotoSynth). Now, imagine how these all might work together. Xbox is more than a gaming platform, it’s a major portal to social networking and engagement in the living room (there are more than 20 million users of Xbox Live, for example). Combined with Natal, you’ve got a new gestural interface to the digital world. And there is no reason why you can’t use Natal to surf the web on your TV (and, in time, your PC), given the right UI and apps. Were Microsoft to decide to open up a web-savvy API and SDK into the Xbox and let its legions of developers innovate on that interface, imagine what might occur. And, of course, Bing would be the search engine of choice for this living room environment, driving share. Sounds like a stretch? All the pieces are there. It’s now about whether the company can take many hands, and make great work. (more)

Over at SEL Gord Hotchkiss has published an interview with me on the future of search. From it:

We’re going through a shift in how folks are understanding what search really means to them. And what it means to them is “I have a need and I need it fulfilled, and I’m going to use the online medium to fulfill it in some way.” We had a very, very basic, well-understood use case for 10 years, which was Google or “like Google”—you put in a couple keywords and you get a response back. And that framework of searching and coming back with the best document to answer a query is morphing. People are asking far more complicated questions now and they’re demanding far more nuanced answers, simply because they know they’re out there….

…Search as an application where your first search isn’t the search itself but rather the search for the right application is a very, very different use case. You have the market influence and dominance of one player splintered into tens of thousands of players. You or I sitting in our office over the weekend could come up with the absolute best structured search application for determining who should be your arborist to cut your trees. And that’s a threat to Google Local Search. If the best application to determine a plumber is the plumbing app on an iPhone—you download it and it automatically pulls all the local results from Yahoo!, Bing, and Google, then pulls all the reviews from Yelp and Angie’s List, then cross-compares that with complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau and Diamond Certified—if that’s the app you use, where’s Google in all of that, right?

….is the topic of my Thursday Signal over at the FM blog. From it:

….the architecture of “apps” is broken, and marketers can have a role in fixing it.

Broken? But it’s just getting started, right? Well, yes – and no. Apps are great, but they lack any number of characteristics that we’ve come to expect from a truly “Web 2″ world. First (and certainly foremost), apps are not connected, in the main, to other apps. They are single use-case driven – a fact that often makes them compelling. But however useful a focused app may be, it can only get more useful if it could communicate with other apps, the way that great web services do. After all, a core tenet of the Web 2 movement was APIs and web services. YouTube would never have become a signal service of the web without being embeddable onto blogs. And blogs would never have risen without RSS.

Second, apps, for the most part, live in “AppWorlds” that are closed and vertically integrated (at least for Facebook and Apple). That means they don’t live in an open, market-driven environment, and are taxed by the owners of distribution channels even before they reach the consumer. That’s not an ecosystem that will drive second and third orders of innovation.

Third, apps live in a world of clutter….. (more)