Back in California 

When I get back to California I always queue up this Beach Boys song. Puts a smile on my face and gets me back in the spirit. It's a great song cause it's not just a great California song it also says how great the whole USA is. I love this country, north, south, east and west, but coming home is getting back to the great weather, clear sunshine, warm days and cool people with the attitude and politics I'm so comfortable with. Don't get me wrong, Boston and New York are great too, but home is in California.

Here are some pics and videos from the New York/Boston trip.

Didn't get a chance to talk with 1/2 the people I wanted to.

It was mostly a busdev trip. To start working face to face with the SwitchABit team. And to plot out the next projects after that.

On Thursday we announced what SwitchABit is -- a platform for wiring together the apps that are rising up, all with APIs that allow them to be combined in itneresting ways, by more technical users, so we all can learn, and do more cool stuff and then who knows what.

Question -- Did you switch over to the new flickr.twittergram.com? How's it working? Any feedback for the team? We're dying to know if it's working for you. Did you push any pics through the engine over the weekend? Did they get through quickly and accurately?

iTunes is now playing Hotel California. I've got it playing all California tunes. Hah. Wonder what's next.

Gillmor Gang food fight 

Finally broke down and listened to the latest Gillmor Gang on the michegas with Facebook and Google and Plaxo. These guys are fucking crazy. Steve Gillmor is still hung up on BigCo's as is Marc Canter. These guys are old enough to know better, and Marc I'm sure does. Arrington is a complete lawyer, using every trick lawyers use to piss people off and Scoble takes the bait hook line and sinker. There's not much light in that show, just a lot of people elbowing each other and saying ouch.

About the substance of it all, see this recent blog post.

The answer is not the BigCo's -- they will have to catch up with what the market decides on. Some little guy will pop in at exactly the moment a sufficient number of users are ready to be free and it will look like they are visionaries when in fact they were at the right place at the right time. Little guys are always entering the market. Every day. It's like roulette. One of them will be the next big guy, but will get there by taking advantage of paralysis caused by the bigness of the current big guys.

But it's hardly the first time I've written about it.

Of all the people on the show Scoble is the most right, but of course no one listens to Scoble. Arrington was out of his mind with self-admiration before he won the Time 100, now he's completely lost it. But he actually made some good points, and I liked the way he called Canter on his bullshit, even though he was giving Scoble shit just for the sake of winding him up and getting him to spin around, which Scoble did, to an amazing extent. I thought there was a good chance he'd explode at one point. That's what I don't like about Arrington. Like most Republican lawyers he's just in it to make people look stupid, not trying to actually improve things. If you think Arrington doesn't deserve this, just listen to the podcast.

Congrats to Gillmor on the theater (pretty sure that's what he's in it for) and with the new TechCrunch label, he's being listened to more than ever. Let's just hope at some point these guys work a little harder to get to the bottom of it.

PS: For the 180th time, wouldn't it be great if Netflix let the users have their movie rating metadata for use in dating sites, for example. Why try to hit a home run when it would be just as good to get on base. Also don't forget Amazon is building up quite a profile on each of their millions of customers and could offer an interface to it through their developer services. Just a thought. It's a big world out there, don't just focus on three "players" -- the world is much bigger and more interesting.