In a column for Canada’s National Post, Dan Gardner eviscerates the global punditocracy, which he points out gets it wrong most of the time. Gardner, author of Future Babble, points to a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, which makes no mention of the failed/wrong predictions.

In the same issue, Foreign Policy features an essay on entrepreneurship and education in China, India and the U.S., raising the specter of the U.S. falling behind. In my lifetime, I’ve heard similar arguments being made about the U.S. falling behind Japan and South East Asia. I have no idea whether the assertions made in the article will come true or not,  but I do know one thing: In time, the author will be proven right or wrong. Such are the perils of the game of predictions.

It is not just predictions; sometimes analysis and its value changes depending on when you look. For example, in 2005, we said Myspace was a good acquisition by News Corp. It was a way to go-up against MTV. At $580 million, it was a bargain. A $900 million-plus advertising deal with Google made the acquisition much more affordable. But somewhere along the way, Facebook happened. Myspace became an executive quagmire, and the whole thing is falling apart. The pendulum has swung between two extremes.

Predictions are particularly hard in the technology industry, as it morphs and changes rapidly. The best you can do is identify trends or macro themes correctly. Last year, at an event, I said Comcast, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Amazon would make serious headlines in 2010. And they did — all year long! (Those safe predictions got me a rap on the fingers from some of my readers.)

Looking into 2011, I don’t really have many predictions. What I have are some reasonable guesses, and since I’ve made these in public forums, I’m happy to repeat them. For instance, at a recent Mobile Monday event, my 2011 prediction was that Samsung was going to become the dominant Android-based device maker and it will come at the expense of early Android leaders — Motorola and HTC.

Samsung has already shown strong sales for its Galaxy S series of Android-based smartphones (over 9.3 million), tablets (one million) and more recently, it announced a new Android-based music player. It also owns the entire component food chain –processors, memory, flash storage and screens — which gives it a key advantage, as most mobile phone makers are grappling with component capacity constraints. In 2011, the battle will really come down between Samsung and Apple.

I shared some of my thoughts with folks from Nieman Journalism Lab, and here are my predictions for the media industry:

When I sit down and think about the future of media, I see two core problems with the media business at large. Most media entities tend to define themselves by features — magazines, newspapers, television and radio — while the audience aka the customers see media entities as “information” resources.

I think we are going to see the continuous destruction of value in the media industry because folks refuse to look beyond what is obvious and comfortable. That is precisely why we are going to see [the] media industry lose [its] shirt on ill-conceived mobile applications, mostly because publishers want to replicate what they know best — an ambiguous, non-measurable advertising paradigm — on digital devices.

Similarly, the media entities will all come to a realization that chasing page views is a zero-sum game, and they are playing with a losing hand against zero-cost pageview-generation megafarms like Facebook, especially at a time when the modes of content consumption and discovery are changing. Content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content are commoditizing the value of banner ads and page views.

1. Bloomberg will continue its march and become one of the most powerful media entities in the U.S. It has television assets to go along with web, print offerings (Bloomberg BusinessWeek), and data terminals — making it a company in the business of selling information.
2. We will see continued implosion of large-scale media barring a handful of national/transnational brands such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. 2011 is going to be particularly hard for companies that have cut back on their core competency journalism.
3. MSNBC [will] make a serious bid to acquire The Huffington Post.
4. The Discovery Group will become one of the major media groups. The company has done a good job of merging its cable television and web businesses with a thriving e-commerce business, making it less reliant on pure advertising revenues. In 2011, Oprah joins the Discovery family. What’s good for Oprah is good for Om!

The media industry’s mobile app problems are already coming home to roost. Women’s Wear Daily notes:

Many magazines that are available on the iPad, such as Esquire, People and The New Yorker, have not posted their digital single-issue sales to the ABC. But Vanity Fair sold 8,700 digital editions of its November issue, down from its average of about 10,500 for the August, September and October issues. Glamour sold 4,301 digital editions in September, but sales dropped 20 percent in October and then another 20 percent, to 2,775, in November. GQ’s November edition sold 11,000 times, which was its worst performance since April (when the iPad was released) and represents a slight decline from its average digital sales of 13,000 between May and October.

After Wired’s enormous debut month, the magazine averaged 31,000 digital sales between July and September, but even that fell in October and November, with sales coming in at 22,000 and 23,000, respectively. (For comparison, the magazine sold 130,000 total print editions for October and November.)

Here are predictions from some of our channels:

• Kevin Tofel has an extensive list of his mobile predictions, in case you are interested.
• Earth2Tech has its top ten solar trends for 2011.
• NewTeeVee folks are arguing for more cord cutting next year.

Image courtesy Flickr user islandguy

Evan Williams and I have known each other for a long time. From a struggling entrepreneur who started Blogger, to a successful founder who got liberal funding for his podcasting start-up Odeo, to the accidental launch of Twitter — to me, he has been pretty much the same person. He prefers to stay out of the limelight, leaving (most if not all the media duties) to his co-founder Biz Stone. And even in crowds he is quiet.

But occasionally he speaks freely. A few weeks ago, he and I discussed the future of the Internet, Twitter and the curse of too much information. It was a long conversation, sometimes rambling, but quite enjoyable. I have edited it down to make it a quick read for you folks. As we enter 2011, Ev’s comments can help you understand what he calls the web of infinite information.

Om Malik: Ev, when you look at the web of today, say compared to the days of Blogger, what do you see? You feel there is just too much stuff on the web these days?

Evan Williams: I totally agree. There’s too much stuff. It seems to me that almost all tools we rely on to manage information weren’t designed for a world of infinite info. They were designed as if you could consume whatever was out there that you were interested in.

Om: A scaling problem?

Ev:  It was true with browsing web and (that is when) Google came in. There was too much to browse on the web. We are thinking the same way about Twitter. Twitter itself isn’t designed for this world of infinite information.  (But) I want Twitter to be an antidote to infinite information, not a cause of it.

Evan Williams with co-founder, Biz Stone (Photo: Om Malik)

We can let people follow as many accounts as possible. We just need to let them find the right stuff. We have been going in this direction. It is just not necessarily obvious. For example, the native re tweet (RT) is a way to share best stuff more widely than that account’s followers. It sort of adds an editorial layer. So do top tweets in search. Here’s what people are saying most about right now. It brings up Twitter in different context. It is only possible when we have enough data.

OM: Do you think that the future of the Internet will involve machines thinking on our behalf

Ev: Yes, they’ll have to. But it’s a combination of machines and the crowd. Data collected from the crowd that is analyzed by machines. For us, at least, that’s the future. Facebook is already like that. YouTube is like that. Anything that has a lot of information has to be like that. People are obsessed with social but it’s not really “social.” It’s making better decisions because of decisions of other people. It’s algorithms based on other people to help direct your attention another way.

OM: If you were starting Twitter today – same service, but in a world that is very mobile, very multi-touch driven and a very portable web – what would it look like?

Ev: I’d have to think about that for a while but i don’t think it looks that different than what we have today. Twitter is a natural fit for mobile – it has the immediacy. There is nothing significantly missing, but (we) need to really boost relevancy. If you can’t read everything, then (what is that) you really do need to know right now. We are working on location because that’s a signal that will help us tell you what’s interesting for you right now.

OM: There is a lot of talk about the web being dead. When you look over next five years into the future what does the Internet look like?

Ev: I think there is misunderstanding of the whole “web is dead” thing. What’s “dead” is the original model of the web, which was completely distributed and decentralized. In the beginning, it was like a million little islands, some of them were bigger islands. If you create something on the web, you’re your own island and you try to get people to visit your island.

Websites realized they couldn’t create everything themselves so they started to import things — advertising, search, and more and more things that were better created by someone else — especially things that had network effects. Companies like DoubleClick or Google owned that whole market. That’s been the case for quite some time. Biggest thing that no one explored until recently was identity. Facebook was the first to be successful in exploring identity. It is obvious why that was a big thing (for them.) On the mobile phone, you don’t have your own island. You’re renting land. It’s a good deal because there’s infrastructure provided (like moving into full service condo).

[Today] there is a completely different pitch. ‘Do I build something on here [iPhone] or on the web?’ There are various options for where to rent. Facebook, Google App Engine — those things will continue to gain traction because consolidation has powerful effects. Things get consolidated because more economical and there are network effects in all these things. The idea of creating something from scratch, which is independent from the web… no one will ever create something that is wholly their own.

There is some risk to the Internet becoming more closed (although it’s not really about closed). It’s that there are fewer players who own, sort of, the land. And that will have implications long term for everything.

OM: Do you have any views on the design and user experience over next few years?

Ev: If you think about user interface (UI) paradigms over the next few years, you have to think of the mobile handset. I think most of the web still isn’t prepared for mobile in general – especially when you look at content sites. There are apps — lots of apps are great — but other than maybe video, there aren’t really great apps for consuming content.

The way we’ve gotten used to consuming content on the web, it’s a lot more broken than we realize because there’s so much stuff around it. Big monitors, multiple tabs… we do that unconsciously now. All that stuff won’t work on here [picks up his iPhone]. We need a different way to navigate. People are doing interesting things, especially on the iPad. I’m interested in all that stuff because they’re trying to figure out a different way to consume web information and it’s pretty cool. I don’t think they’re doing that on phones yet though.

OM: How should technology industry and entrepreneurs be thinking about the information consumption problem that is coming onto us?

Ev: I think we need to design (our products) for a world of infinite information. Gmail’s priority inbox is a great example. They’re recognizing we may not read all our email. I don’t know what the others would be. :)
We should also think about — for the good of society — how do we actually help people? Google has always wanted people to come to Google and then go away. They don’t want you hanging out on Google. That’s very different than lots of other services that measure success by time on site.

If you’re more of a utility — a site where you come in, get what you want, then leave. We want to be that. It’s how do we deliver the most value. Because info is infinite and there’s always somewhere else to go, delivering more value in less time should always be the focus.

OM: So what does a start-up or even Twitter take into account in this scary new future?

Ev: It’s a really significant decision about what platforms you’re building for. No one is going to limit themselves to one platform, which is actually kind of annoying — costs go up because have to build for android, iPhone, web, etc. It’s hard to decide. You want to be everywhere.

OM: So how do you think people should think about Twitter? Like electricity — you don’t even think about it; it’s just there?

Ev: [Laughs] I would like people to know they’re using Twitter but they shouldn’t have to think about *how* to use Twitter.

Crowley has been experimenting with local and location for nearly a decade, first at now-forgotten city guides maker Vindigo, then at Dodgeball, a hot social-networking-meets-location startup that he sold to Google. I’ve been following Foursquare since its launch.

Recently, I caught up with Dennis to talk about the importance of context to the future of location-based services, augmented reality and Foursquare itself. Given Dennis is competing with Google and Facebook, it was obvious that he didn’t want to talk about specific products and their evolution, but here are excerpts from what was a long, rambling, enjoyable and educational conversation

Om Malik: What is the mission for Foursquare? Are you a social network or more than that?

Dennis Crowley: Google has that noble mission statement: ‘to collect and organize all the world’s information.’ I think a lot of what we’re doing is taking that and putting a spin on it. I think a lot about [things like] how we can build things that really alert people [to] all the interesting things that are happening within the general radius of them.

OM: Sort of like augmented reality?

DC: You know, everyone talks about augmented reality. The version of augmented reality we’re serving up… it’s just like, “Hey, there’s something happening a block away that you should know about. Hey, there’s a cool piece of art around the corner that you should look at. Hey, this is the sandwich place that your buddies are always talking about.” All the little things that we’re doing — we’re kind of building that platform and ecosystem that enable such things to happen.

OM: From an average person’s standpoint, location is still kind of geeky and a lot of work.

DC: Yeah. I think your points are valid; it’s not for everyone yet. The same thing was true of cell phones. But eventually, it’s these things that prove their worth, and they prove how powerful they can be and how much they can affect your lives. And you participate in that: You buy a cell phone; you get on Facebook.

I think people say the same thing about Foursquare, and I’m like, “I know, I know. Don’t worry about it. We’re going to be here for a couple of years and come back to you when you’re ready for us.”

I think of what we’re doing is sort of interesting now, but it’s going to be super-interesting 24 months from now when more people are aware of things that we’re doing and aware of the value that comes out of it. We’re a little bit early.

OM: When was the first time you started to think about location as a contextual vector for data?

DC: The first phone that I had that had the ability was a Sprint phone with a great screen. This was in 2000. First thing I did [was] hack together a WAP site that would allow me to search for places from my phone.

I ended up working for a startup called Vindigo that was doing city guides on Palm Pilot. And I’m like, “Oh my God you have all these people pop in the screen, letting you know which venues they’re going to. That’s a mechanism for popularity, for interest.” This was before a lot of the social stuff was around, but we were thinking, “Maybe we should show the most popular restaurants.”

I got laid off in 2001, and that’s when I built the Friend Finder stuff. There was no language even to describe what we were doing. This was before social networks. Much later, we described it as, “Friendster on your cell phone.” That’s what made Dodgeball take off.

Of course, we brought the stuff to Google, and had an interesting two years there. While we were at Google, we were doing some experiments. Like, can we use game mechanics to encourage people? So we made a leader board. Which of your friends have checked‑in most often? You make this competitive, [and] people go nuts over it.

We started thinking a lot about a history page. Recommendation engines were just starting to get really good then. This [location history] was a good source of recommendation. We couldn’t get that stuff built over at Google.

People are giving us one or two or three pieces of data everyday about the places they go to. We can cut that data up. This is a new way to look at your neighborhood based on the places you’ve been, and your friends have been to. Places that people like you go to. I can look at the East Village of New York in an entirely different way because the Foursquare algorithm redefined the city for me.

We’ve been talking about it for years. Now we have a critical mass of people who are contributing data and willing to play with it. It’s like a perfect storm with the timing.

OM: Right now, Facebook’s social graph defines a lot of experiences. Do you think you will have this world where location just defines all content and data consumption experiences?

DC: The metric I like is that you should be able to stand anywhere in the world and Foursquare should be able to tell you something interesting nearby to do. It’s something interesting to strive for. You are right. It’s not just places; it’s experiences.

I think it’s getting there. The hard thing to figure out is its context. You’ve got the phone as the center [of the network], so it’s collecting all these data points. The next big thing to figure out is what is the contextual relevance of all that? Are you moving? Are you with friends? Where are you? Where have you been? Where are you headed?

All that stuff is interesting. You can take that stuff in and you can use that to make these choices and these decisions and hopefully serve up some interesting content. So, you’re [asking], ‘When is it going to happen?’ I think it’s happening.

OM: How do you think location will be part of our daily life and how it will impact commerce?

Dennis There are three ideas inside Foursquare. There’s latitude and longitude, and the time and day that you’re standing in right now. So this is the thing that’s most interesting to you (as of now.) That’s one of the things that we’re psyched about.

The second thing is the role that game mechanics can play in encouraging people to actually go out and do things they wouldn’t do. That’s a big idea that we’re still in the middle of trying to figure out.

I think the third big idea is the way that you can use a combination of location-based services and social media to empower local merchants to connect with customers in different ways. It’s fortunate for us that it’s one of the things that’s going to be very easy to monetize.

OM: The reason Facebook works is it maps real people together. That’s why its social graph works. You have this notion that mapping real physical places to the web and to people is the next big wave. Why?

DC: Everything that’s going on with social media is about sharing photos and about sharing links, sharing videos and sharing ideas. It’s all great stuff, but it all happens online. I think that’s the thing that frustrates me. It goes back to the core experience we had with Friendster.

In the past, I would spend all this time on my Friendster profile finding people and sharing the profile, and at the end of the day, it was close the lid on your laptop and that was it. It didn’t do anything.

So Facebook is amazing. It’s a thousand times better than Friendster was. But I still don’t feel like it’s working as hard for you as it should be. It’s like when you step away from it, it’s still there, [and] people are still sharing stuff, but it’s not surfacing. It’s not making the way that I interact with the physical world better.

It might connect me with people who obviously live in the real world, but it’s not connecting to me to the world in general. It’s all very abstract. Forgive me for being crazy.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Research Report: Location — The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation
• Is Geolocation a Real Business or Just a Feature?

I essentially focused on devices that are part of my daily life and were launched this year. My list had four devices: the iPad, the Sprint Overdrive Mobile Hotspot, the Sonos S5 and the MacBook Air. Having just acquired the Roku Box and the Microsoft Kinect, I didn’t quite have enough time with those two to make an informed decision, though at first blush, I absolutely love those two gizmos. Roku, incidentally is on NewTeeVee’s list of top five video gadgets of 2010.

My most important question when picking the device was actually pretty basic – can I live and work without the particular gadget? So from that perspective, here is my pick.

MacBook Air 2010 Edition:

The 2.13 GHz, 256 GB Storage, 4GB RAM, 13-inch screen version of the MacBook Air is my gadget of the year.

The Back Story

It is safe to assume that at some point or the other in my life, I have owned most if not all models of Apple’s PowerBook and MacBook line-up of portable computers since the introduction of OS X. Whether it is the aesthetics, or it is the ease of use of the software, I have always found working with Apple’s devices easier. However, there was one problem with them – they were almost always heavy, which was quite a pain considering that I travel a lot for work and often work from remote locations.

So three years ago when Apple announced the MacBook Air, I was quick to order it. It was underpowered – a slow processor, anemic memory capabilities, a tiny hard drive and a somewhat limited set of expansion options. The battery only compared to my stamina. Nevertheless, the weight of the device was right and it was worth the many compromises. It forced me to essentially respect the less is more philosophy in new ways. The Mac Book Air’s second version got a little better, especially as Apple offered SSD drive options. I upgraded and loved taking it along when I travelled. For other times, I used a 15-inch MacBook Pro.

A Machine For All Reasons

And then in October 2010, Steve Jobs introduced the new MacBook Air. The newly redesigned, unibody version of 2010 MacBook Air had some clever technology hacks, that improved the performance almost exponentially. Indeed, our own Apple channel here at GigaOM aptly dubbed this new MacBook Air “the future of notebooks.”

I had initially received the 13-inch 1.86 GHz version of the machine for review. I felt it was underpowered and wanted more storage and more memory. I ended up spending extra dollars and snapped up the top of the line unit and have not regretted it for a second. And within two hours of using this device, I knew it was time to make this my main machine.

A sturdy body and a great keyboard complemented a speedy SSD drive, faster processor and more memory. And the best part was – the battery lasted forever. Going to New York? No problems – this laptop cruised across the country without needing a charge. The dedicated graphics chip makes it easy to watch videos, which look so much better on the old fashioned screen. (I hate those glossy screens, for some odd reasons.)

More importantly, Apple made some tweaks that allowed the computer to turn on instantly and wake-up from sleep mode even faster when you flipped open the screen. Open the screen and start taking notes, writing a blog post, manipulate a photo or upload a video.

Getting on the web and replying to email is almost an instantaneous act. Furthermore, it doesn’t get hot like other Apple laptops – though Adobe’s Flash when used inside Safari or Mozilla Firefox does cause the computer temperature to go up – but since I use Google’s Chrome browser, it doesn’t matter that much to me.

Why is it my gadget of the year?

I use it almost 12-to-16 hours a day: in other words, it is almost always on. I often watch Netflix on it, I use it as my music console, I use it write, reply to emails and surf the web. It slides into my favorite bag (which unfortunately was too small for a regular laptop) where it snugly sits keeps company with my iPad, my Moleskin notebook, my Sprint 4G Overdrive Hot Spot and my beat-up Montblanc pen. It aesthetically pleasing, it is well constructed, it is well priced and it is not ostentatious. It is a classic, much like a well-made plain white shirt. I get more use from this device than anything else I own. It makes working fun.

And the One’s That Didn’t Make The Cut

My Runner-Up: Sonos S5, in tandem with the Sonos wireless dock is perhaps the second most used device in my apartment. It is a high-quality sound system, it is affordable and it has spectacular sound. If you live in a small apartment, this is a great option.

And in the third place: The iPad didn’t make the cut for the top spot, mostly because of my work rhythms and how I do it. And despite my own early excitement, I have not been able to make it an efficient part of my work flow.

That said, I read almost exclusively on the iPad, thanks to great apps like Evernote, Instapaper, Reeder and Flipboard. I often compose memos to myself using Writer and during baseball season, the At Bat app from MLB. In fact I wouldn’t know what to do during the baseball seasons without the iPad and MLB app.

And had the MacBook Air not shown up this fall, well, iPad would have been my runner-up for 2010.

Why Not a Single Phone?: You will notice that there isn’t a phone on the list – reason is simple: I have a love-hate relationship with by Blackberry Bold. I will not use the iPhone as long as it has network problems. Android doesn’t do it for me, but hopefully things will be different next year, especially from Samsung, which has started introducing great looking Galaxy Series of devices in the market.

I am currently enamored with the new Nokia X3-02 device – a feature phone that combines touch with traditional phone elements. It is inexpensive, it is super sleek and it has enough web services built into it to make it useful in the brave new world of connected phones. It is aesthetically appealing and is well-designed phone, though the build in camera is of poor quality.

Earlier this morning, while cleaning out my desk, I stumbled onto not one but three iPod Shuffles. Amazingly, all of them had retained their charge, even though I have not touched them since I moved over six months ago. It was fun to see them all in one place and realize how cyclical Apple can be when it comes to design – a rectangular shape followed by a square and then a rectangle and now a square again (I am biased towards the third edition of the iPod Shuffle — the one without any controls).

When I started listening to the iPod Shuffle this morning, I realized what I had on my hands was a playlist of my most favorite songs, each one with a memory or a story associated with the song itself. I didn’t need to skip songs because in many ways it was musical bliss. Today, when I listen to music on my computer, I often resort to using the Genius feature – mostly because it makes it easy to auto-magically find music from a gargantuan music library. It had initially taken me nearly six months to build a perfect list and then only keep adding to it, something I described in a post I wrote back in September 2005 as the iShuffle Principle.

The original iPod Shuffle sent me on a mission of whittling down a lot of things and packing them into a couple of suitcases. Ironically, that behavior of self-editing has started to spread into other parts of my life. In the past, I would take a flyer on mainstream clothing brands – but now I don’t think about the brand, but about the shirt I absolutely love, the jeans that are an ideal fit and a watch that I will wear for rest of my life.  I have even started to forgo coffee if I can’t get it from a handful of places known for their quality.

I only buy the paper editions of books I absolutely love — the rest of them are simply Kindle downloads. My favorite television shows, such as Frost, Foyle’s War and House MD, I have as DVDs — everything else is on Netflix or a digital download from the Apple store. I wonder if this is a behavior that is going to get more pervasive in the future. Will we react to the problem of plenty by becoming highly selective and taking our hyper-personalized media consumption habits into how we shop, live and behave?

‘Today’s portals are not really about search, but instead they are all about pageviews and other services,’ says Page. ‘We are all about search and pure search, while the other guys think of themselves as media companies, not as search engines any more,’ quips Brin. (from my story for Forbes.com)

They knew search queries were nothing without a super infrastructure to support those queries. But more importantly, they knew simplicity of that experience would endear them to the masses. Google came up with a clean white page that featured nothing but the Google logo, one small box for entering your queries and the search button. That was a perfect solution, and I bet Apple’s Steve Jobs would have a tough time finding fault with it. One look at the page and you knew exactly what to do next.

Now for the first ten or so years of Google’s life, that simple search-box driven philosophy worked well for the Mountain View, Calif-based Internet giant. It also found a way to augment that simplicity with a text-ads-based business model, which has turned the company into a nearly $30 billion a year behemoth.

Google’s Consumer Future

As it looks at its future, Google needs to realize that it has a “user experience” problem and its simplicity — the elegant search box — isn’t enough, especially as it starts to compete with rivals whose entire existence revolves around easy, consumer experiences. To me, user experience isn’t about making things pretty and using pretty icons. Instead it’s about making simple, beautiful, usable and user-friendly interfaces.

No one can argue with Google’s ability to engineer great software — they’ve done so in the past — but that simply isn’t good enough in the new worlds they are trying to conquer. Televisions, phones, productivity applications and even Google’s own local pages are less about search and more about engagement: something not core to the company’s corporate DNA. Here are three major challenges Google needs to surmount:

• Make software usable by tens of millions of people on a disparate array of products.
• Overcome its history of only using data to define its future.
• Figure out how to keep people in their playground, rather than helping people find the information they were looking for and sending them elsewhere: a radical new approach to business.

Those problems are behind the issues the company is facing with some of its products. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Google was postponing the release of Google TV software, which in turn would delay its partners’ plans to show connected televisions at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 (CES). Google TV software has come under criticism for being too complex.

Such challenges aren’t unique to Google TV, though they might be most acute because of its newness. For the past few days, I’ve been using a Nexus S, a smartphone made by Samsung on behalf of Google using Android OS – which is arguably an OS engineered for a cloud-centric world. The hardware, as one would expect from Samsung, is of top-notch quality. The T-Mobile 3G network delivers most, if not all, of the time. Most of the apps I love are also available on the device.

Yet the Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after having Chinese food: a tad empty. That’s not to say millions of devices won’t sell with Android on them, but the OS  lacks the smoothness and fluidity of Apple’s iOS. It takes a few more gestures to get things done on Android. When I use the iPod touch, I can feel the obvious differences in the user experience. It’s one of the main reasons why Android’s biggest supporters — HTC, Samsung and Motorola — are adding their own user-experience shell on top of Android.

Lest you call me an Android-hater, Andy Rubin, one of the co-fathers of Android, recently acknowledged at an industry event: “I would probably characterize Android today as an enthusiast product for early adopters — or wives of tech enthusiasts.”  Recently, I got the Cr-48, a Chrome OS-based laptop for trials. After using it for a few days, I pointed out in a review that the Chrome OS interface “is rough around the edges,” and that most of the Chrome OS web apps were still a work in progress.

Google TV (based on Android), Google Android, and Google Chrome OS are complex software that have a unique challenge: They need to work on disparate devices in disparate form factors. It’s a unique quandary that would fox any company, and is particularly challenging for a company used to offering us the web through a single search box. Even Microsoft didn’t have a task that challenging with its desktop-oriented Windows OS. It ran on a single platform, and whenever Microsoft tried to adapt it to new platforms, well, you know what happened.

When Past Defines the Future

Doug Bowman, currently the design head honcho at San Francisco-based Twitter, said in a blog post about his time at Google:

When I joined Google as its first visual designer, the company was already seven years old. Seven years is a long time to run a company without a classically trained designer. Google had plenty of designers on staff then, but most of them had backgrounds in CS or HCI. And none of them were in high-up, respected leadership positions. Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions.

With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data.

Those are harsh words, but also true from a guy who worked on projects that included Google Calendar. That said, I totally understand that Google would be very careful about its user interface, especially around web services. Given it has hundreds of millions of users, one can’t fault them for being data-driven in their approach to user experience and user interaction. However, that argument doesn’t work, especially as it starts pushing more consumer-centric products.

Unlike the web and search, where it defined the user experience, in the world of physical goods, Google has to compete with the likes of Apple, which starts designing products with user experience as the life-force. Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.

Google, during its first ten years, thrived by helping people go elsewhere on the web. The faster it sent them elsewhere, the sooner those users would return. However, these new platforms Google is trying to build are inherently personal. Unlike the PC-based web browser which tries to help you find things, these new platforms are about bringing information to you. They are about discovery, not search.

Google is like an old dog trying to learn new tricks. The good news is that Google isn’t that old, and more importantly, the company knows it has a problem and is trying to find ways to fix it.  Rubin isn’t the only Google executive who has been vocal about building better user experiences. David Girouard, who heads up Google’s cloud efforts, told me the company is working on building better user experiences for their apps as well as other Google offerings.

Knowing you have a problem is the first step; fixing it is the next one. Hopefully, Google does that fast.

Related content on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Apple’s Path to the Living Room
• Mobile Operators’ Strategies for Connected Devices
• Who Will Benefit From Broadband Innovation?

The Mini-Review

First, the hardware:

• The boot-up is extremely fast, and the log-on process is smooth and speedy, as long as one has a Google Mail account. (Google Apps ID doesn’t quite work.)
• The screen is great, but the graphic capabilities are pretty limited.
• There is a single USB port and a flash memory card slot. Frankly, having lived with the old MacBook Air with a single USB port, I don’t see much of a problem.
• The trackpad is awful.
• I love the dedicated Search button and would love to see it on all computers.
• The laptop picked up most of the commonly used USB peripherals. Both a Logitech mouse and a Microsoft optical mouse worked just fine, without need for special discovery or driver installs.

Second, the User Interface/Experience:

• The Interface is rough around the edges, and what you see is essentially the Chrome web browser.
• It takes too many cues from Microsoft Windows, which is understandable, considering they are going after the mainstream and enterprise market.
• The OS needs better font support, and reminds me of some early Linux distributions.
• The user experience expects us to come to the idea of using browser tabs instead of apps, a weird notion, but not that strange if you’ve used the Chrome browser as your primary browser and are used to cloud-based services.
• If you use Google Chat and Google Tasks, then you easily understand the idea of “Panels,” a new feature inside Chrome OS that runs in small, easy-to-access panes at the bottom right of the browser.
• Even the best web apps currently available at the Chrome Web Store are a work in progress.
• The biggest challenge for Google’s Chrome OS is going to be fighting against many life-long habits of using a desktop OS.

Now for the Cloud-based Services:

• Despite being severely underpowered, there’s one thing the device does very well: let you use Google apps, especially Google Docs, Gmail and other cloud services (from Google) without a problem.
• The YouTube experience is marginal at best, and Netflix doesn’t work.
• Most of your browser-based apps will work, but Adobe Flash on Chrome OS is like a toddler learning to crawl. It will be a long time before it gets to the maturity of Adobe on Windows platform. Adobe has already stated that it plans to improve its integrated Flash performance in Chrome OS, essentially calling it a “work-in-progress.”

Bottom line: Will I use Cr-48 or something like it as my primary computer? It would be tough for me –I admit I have a life-long habit of using a full desktop operating system — to make Chrome OS my primary computing experience. That doesn’t mean I won’t keep an open mind, but for now, it’s a no-go for me. My more portable, 2.13 GHz MacBook Air is the machine I like, and even as I spend a lot of time inside the browser, I prefer a desktop with the Chrome browser and raw power. Plus my Mac has Silverlight, which lets me play Netflix and use third-party, native apps such as Reeder.

As Google stated very clearly, this particular device isn’t going to be sold in the market; its partners are going to make devices that consumers can buy. I hope they do a better job and come up with more attractive hardware.

The real story to focus on is the ChromeOS, what it really means and whom it targets.

So let’s do that instead.

The Rise of the Web OS

The growth of Google has coincided with the shift to the web. Google is a company that has been a believer in networked computing from its very inception. Since 2004, an increasing amount of our focus and attention has been devoted to the browser and what we can do inside the browser. The so-called Web 2.0 concept only helped enhance the inside-the-browser experience, thus slowly replacing desktop as our primary focus of attention.

Thanks to new technologies, ample bandwidth and Moore’s Law, the concept of a web operating system has become a reality. The web isn’t really an OS in the classical sense of the word, but instead is a platform to do things: for making phone calls, playing games, writing documents, sending emails, instant messaging and even photo editing. These are some of the tasks some of us old fogeys still do on our desktop operating systems using desktop software, but slowly and surely that desktop era is coming to an end.

Google last week announced its much-awaited cloud OS, the Chrome OS, which is nothing more than just a browser running on a stripped down version of Linux to capitalize on the hardware features such as audio and video. In the end, Chrome is about doing things on the web, inside a browser. Apple, of course, has taken a different tack for its cloud OS. The iOS which powers iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad fosters the idea of using small chunks of code for doing specialized tasks and embedding the browser inside these apps.

In a blog post this past week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote:

So we’ve gone from a world where we had reliable disks and unreliable networks, to a world where we have reliable networks and basically no disks. Architecturally that’s a huge change—and with HTML5 it is now finally possible to build the kind of powerful apps that you take for granted on a PC or a Macintosh on top of a browser platform. You can build everything that you used to mix and match with client software—taking full advantage of the capacity of the web.

The Enterprise

As a consumer, one is going to find Chrome OS very limiting, especially since have some pre-conceived notions about what a personal computer is supposed to do. In addition, the availability of smartphones and tablets makes Chrome OS less necessary form a consumer standpoint because they are more consumer-friendly and quite capable devices.

Google’s own Android OS is already in front of the consumers (in form of phones and tablets). It will be sometime next year when the first Chrome OS devices will come to the market, and it won’t be until end of 2011 when (or if) Chrome OS become a viable option in the market place. By then, as I wrote earlier, “who knows where Android will be?” If the early popularity of tablets is any indication, consumer computing is moving towards the tablet form-factor and for Android – that is indeed a good thing.

In comparison, Chrome OS is ideally suited for business environments that need lots of low-cost computers designed to do certain specific tasks cheaply and without much maintenance. Rolling out centrally managed apps minus security problems and maintenance hassles has been the Holy Grail for corporate computing. Chrome OS and HTML5-based web apps that run inside the browser are a perfect solution, as I argued in my earlier post.

Our GigaOM Pro analyst David Card agreed in his research note (subscription required):

Chrome OS also suffers from awkward positioning, both externally to developers and potential customers, and internally within Google’s own product line-up. While it’s true that PCs serve both companies and consumers, the value of the Network Computer premise appeals only to enterprise IT managers. Its manageability and simplified functionality play best in applications like airline reservations, point-of-sale terminals and ATMs, or in limited-application mobile devices used in shipping and store inventory management. Yet at least for now, app stores are purely consumer offerings. The apps Google showed last week all came from media companies (New York Times, NPR, Sports Illustrated), Electronic Arts and Amazon.

Google will be best suited to focus Chrome OS and all its energies on business buyers — call centers, retail outlets and airlines to start with — and forget about the consumers.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Report: The Future of Netbooks
• Google Takes the Open Battle to Apple on Multiple Fronts
• Google Chrome OS: What to Expect

Network computer, at the time, was defined as a stripped-down machine, with little or no moving parts, cheap processors and ample bandwidth to compute over the network. It was a computing equivalent of Silicon Valley’s Moby Dick. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle was the proverbial Captain Ahab.

Larry “Captain Ahab” Ellison

In 1995, Larry Ellison talked about a network computer that would cost $500 a pop and would free the world from Microsoft. “A PC is a ridiculous device. What the world really wants is to plug into a wall to get electronic power, and plug in to get data,” said Ellison at the time.

His idea was a sound one, though at the time, a tad impractical. Oracle’s Network Computer subsidiary lost $175 million and was eventually spun out as Liberate Technologies, a company that transitioned to building software for set-top boxes.

Nevertheless, the idea had strong appeal for Silicon Valley’s power brokers, and they kept plowing dollars into the network computer. Marc Andreessen was an early champion. What was good for Ellison was good for IBM too. But the guy who was completely besotted by the idea of network computer was Eric Schmidt. It was Schmidt and his cohorts at Sun who came up with Java Station, a disaster if there was any. The Java-based network computer was underpowered when compared to the PCs of the day.

Have a Corona

The network computer hype had died down by 1998, but the Sun team hadn’t given up. They once again went back to the drawing board and started working on a network-business appliance, code-named Corona.

I first broke the story about Sun’s ultra-secret PC killer back in August 1999. Unlike an all-purpose consumer device, it was targeted at the enterprises and was pitched as “zero admin cost” machine. No need for expensive storage — just lean processors with ample bandwidth. It plug into the network and essentially brought up a “state” for folks to start working. You needed a special Java-enabled card that created the “state” on any device, regardless from where you were accessing the data. It was targeted at airlines, retailers and package transportation companies.

Sun eventually called it the Sun Ray, thus bringing a short-term revival of thin clients. Even a new version of Java Station was launched, to no avail. The network computer in early attempts failed because the devices were too expensive when compared to low-cost personal computers and bandwidth was still extremely expensive and the connections, even on corporate networks weren’t fast enough. The software and the experience just weren’t compelling enough, and there were limited use cases for the device.

The Past Is the Future

As Chrome OS was being launched, I couldn’t help but think about the similarities between the two products. The early customers for this new Chrome OS based computer (with no admin-costs) are American Airlines, Intercontinental Hotels and some retailers. Onstage, Schmidt said that he and his peers were talking about these very same problems — total cost of ownership, security and ease of use — when they were first discussing the network computers.

“We were right that the underlying problems really were a problem, but were wrong in understanding how complex the problems were,” he said. Of course, as time passed the networks got faster, the components got cheaper, but more importantly, the rise of AJAX and the evolution of the open source LAMP stack allowed the idea of web-based applications to blossom. And from there, evolved the idea of a web-based operation environment/system. “Chrome finally broke through architectural frameworks with respect to speed and security,” a beaming Schmidt said. “It is now finally possible to build powerful apps on top of a browser platform.”

Schmidt believes Chrome OS is the third viable real operating system, one that breaks from the past, and looks into a cloud-services centric future that would re-define the idea of what an OS should be.

With Chrome, Google has done a good job of executing on the idea of “network computer,” offering a suite of cloud services. In 2008, I wrote up a list of ten features that a good cloud client must have — Google has done one better with their prototype device, the CR-48.

“The long term vision of browser as an OS for web applications” said, Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of Product Management for Chrome said. Making browsers speedy and responsive to today’s web tasks, they have made it possible to do more inside the browser.

I was particularly impressed by the improvements they have made to JavaScript, a boon for web applications. Other extensions that tap into the hardware for graphical improvements will only going to make the browser more desktop-like. Pichai has to feel good — he is helping realize his boss’s vision for the network computer. Too bad, Schmidt and Ellison are not talking to each other anymore.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Report: The Future of Netbooks
• Google Takes the Open Battle to Apple on Multiple Fronts
• Google Chrome OS: What to Expect

Go Virtual Young Man

Six years ago, I wrote an article for Business 2.0: Escape from Silicon Valley. In that essay, I talked to some startups that were based outside the San Francisco Bay Area. While many of them didn’t make it to the finish line, the concept of working from anywhere and collaborating with virtual teams made perfect sense to me.

In September 2006 when we started our WebWorkerDaily blog, it was based on the notion that work itself was going to be recast and reshaped. So much so, that for the first 15 months of GigaOM, we existed as a virtual company, working from cafes or borrowed office spaces. Our first remote team member was Chancey Mathews, who was our web master. Soon there after, Anne Zelenka joined us from Denver, from where she edited WebWorkerDaily, along with a distributed team of writers, many of whom I haven’t even met.

It wasn’t until 2008 that we got ourselves an office in Pier 38. We added people based on talent, not on the proximity by location. In the knowledge economy, not doing so would be foolish and would limit our prospects. The deciding factor was prospective team members’ connectedness. As Maynard Webb, former COO of eBay and CEO of LiveOps aptly put it: work is the new the killer app of the Internet.

Connectedness

For the longest time, the concept of work had been be confined and defined by two parameters: space and time. We all used to go to a central location to work. We would work at our nine-to-five jobs, then come home, watch television, read a little, go to sleep, and start all over again.

Just as time would define our work and our life, space or location would define industries. Automobiles blossomed in Detroit. Filmmaking and television flourished in California. Fashion thrived in Paris. Publishing and advertising found a home in New York City and in these locations, business giants of the 20th century attracted hundreds of thousands of workers.

With the rise of broadband, a new factor has come into play: connectedness. Connectedness allows companies big and small to exist as a stateless entity. Today, a startup can offer a new device dreamed up and designed in California, manufactured in China and sold in Europe with support services being in India or the Philippines.

It is not just startups; companies as large as Cisco Systems and Nokia are working across different time zones, accomplishing different tasks and functioning like a beast that never sleeps. Thanks to connectedness, the old-fashioned notions of space and time are soon going to be rendered moot. How can a day end at 5:00 p.m. when half your team is spread across multiple time zones?

The Human Cloud

We call this shift in idea of work “the human cloud,” and just as cloud computing disrupted the idea of computing and corporate IT infrastructure, the human cloud is shorthand for the intersection of web and work.

The new human cloud opens up new opportunities – something Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce is going to discuss at the conference, alongside Rebecca Jacoby, CIO of Cisco Systems, Bradley Horowitz of Google, noted authors John Hagel and John Sealy Brown. (Full list of speakers is here.)

The conference is going to be run by the extremely talented Mathew Ingram, senior writer for our GigaOM blog, and Simon Mackie, editor of WebWorkerDaily. Net:Work will be held on Dec. 9 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco (and you can register here.) Join me.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Report: The Enterprise Videoconference Landscape, 2010 – 2015
• Report: Web Worker Survey 2010
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Bebo, which at one time competed with Myspace, was first acquired by AOL (then owned by Time Warner) in March 2008 for $850 million, making the Birches rich beyond belief. Of course, the deal brought down a handful of Time Warner/AOL executives, including AOL CEO Randy Falco and AOL President and COO Ron Grant.

AOL’s new chief executive, Tim Armstrong, realizing the futility of fighting a losing battle with Facebook, the current darling of social networking set, decided it was time to cut his losses. In June 2010, Bebo was sold for less than $10 million to Criterion Captial Partners, an investment company based in Los Angeles. Adam Levin, the man behind Criterion, brought in Akash Garg, formerly CTO of social networking also-ran Hi5, as CTO and Microsoft-ie Kevin Bachus, the co-creator of the Xbox, as its chief product officer for the equivalent of the web’s ultimate fixer-upper.

Fast-forward to today, and Bebo is ready to be sold for the third time, with the price pegged at somewhere between $20 million to $25 million. Who are the buyers? Two of my sources have said it’s a large media company looking to goose its web presence. In recent weeks, many buyers have come knocking on Bebo’s door, my sources tell me. A Bebo company spokesperson declined to comment.

Large media companies such as Disney and Bertelsmann could use Bebo to boost their efforts in social gaming; after all, that’s the new form of entertainment. Despite a decline in fortunes, the site is said to have around 110 million monthly visitors, enough for someone looking to give their web fortunes a boost. Stay tuned for more details on buyers.

Traffic Data source: Compete.com

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Why Browsers Don’t Matter Anymore
• Google Takes the Open Battle to Apple on Multiple Fronts
• Google Chrome OS: What to Expect