The guys over at Gizmodo recently penned a really good piece on the impending war between Apple and Google.  Jesus Diaz really dove down a few layers and reveals just how love has turned to hate.

Apple has sued Google’s phone manufacturer for infringing on 20 iPhone patents. Not so long ago, Apple and Google were a nice couple. Then, everything went to hell.

The romance began with the iPhone, even while we didn’t know about it in 2006. Back then, Steve Jobs invited Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt to his house, to sit at his table, and have vanilla-frosted cupcakes and tea together. It was instant love.

An Affair to Remember

They happily worked in the iPhone’s 2007 launch. Google gave Apple their maps, their search, and their mail, and Apple gave Google the best spot in their new shiny device. Apple put YouTube into the iPhone and Google made YouTube to work nicely with QuickTime, moving all videos to the h.264 standard (so Apple could avoid that nasty Flash kid). Google even optimized their web apps for the iPhone, and Apple smiled.

And so they played in the new smartphone playground together and giggled at Yahoo and Microsoft and Adobe and everyone else. They were the coolest kids, they told everyone how happy they were, and everyonethought they were the perfect lovers.

The iPhone quickly became a huge success, positioning itself as the future of ubiquitous consumer-oriented computing. Just the kind that Google wants to control to deliver its highly targeted ads. Google noticed the success, and the relationship started to rupture. I can imagine the meeting between Eric, Sergey and Larry: “Whaaaa…? How did they…? Fuck, we need to get into this now.” It was then that Google started to reveal its true face — and their plans for the little company they bought in 2005, helmed by the phone wiz Andy Rubin. They realized that they couldn’t let Apple control the main window to the web. After all, it was their web, not Apple’s.

Google presented Android, their own smartphone operating system made to imitate Apple’s. Not only did they devote resources to create this, but they wanted to give it for free to every manufacturer and carrier. It didn’t take much for Steve Jobs to realize that the romance was over. It was betrayal. Google was his new Microsoft. The real nemesis that could build a new dominant “Windows”, and turn his early success with the iPhone into the new Mac underdog.

That was when all went to hell.

Escalating Conflict

It wasn’t an open war. At the beginning, it all happened behind curtains, like when Apple allegedly stopped multitouch on Android and Google complied, realizing that they might otherwise be stepping into a patent minefield. Like the one the just got into now, with HTC as the proxy.

Steve Jobs couldn’t tie his tongue, however. Back in January 2008, he was already criticizing Google and Android, pointing out that it wasn’t going to be good for anyone. It was the first knife shining in the open, but it wasn’t the last one.

After that, executives at Apple have been pretty clear about what they think about Google, like when Tim Cook said that Google was still trying to catch up with the first iPhone or Jobs gave his blunt-as-bricks opinion on Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” mantra. “It’s bullshit,” he said, a sentiment now shared by many.

It almost feels like this is something personal for Steve Jobs, as if he believed that a fake-smiled Eric Schmidt sat at the Apple’s board, eating his food and drinking his wine, while plotting to kidnap Apple’s baby since the very beginning. It seems the feeling is mutual: Schmidt delivered his own snide against Jobs and his new baby recently, pooping on the iPad as nothing more than a big phone.

Knowing how things developed, it’s surprising that Schmidt stayed on Apple’s board for so long. He resigned on August 2009, just as the war started to go open, first with Google grabbing mobile advertising company AdMob from Apple’s hands(which forced Apple to buying Quattro Wireless). Then with Apple pissing on Google’s parade by stealing Lala, the music streaming service that Larry and Sergei wanted to have.

The love affair was definitely over, and the bitter separation started. Like gangrene, the hate started to spread to every aspect in the relations between the two companies. According to insiders, negotiating the terms for maps in the new iPhone OS and the iPad was a fierce battle, to the point in which Apple went andbought their own charting company at one point. Who knows if that move was part of their poker hand—like the rumors about Apple replacing Google search withBing—or an actual desire to get fully independent from Google.

The War for the Future of Computing

The true war, however, has started today, with the lawsuit against HTC. It names their Windows phones, but that’s just a distracting maneuver. The core example in the lawsuit is Android, and that’s where the real attack is. And by going against HTC, the weakest link in the chain, Apple is not only attacking Google. It’s also giving a warning to every manufacturer out there: If you try to pull a Nexus Two for them, we will launch our missiles against you. Motorola—who confirmed they are working with Google—could be the next one in the list.

Jobs clearly knows that they are playing for the domination of the future of computing, the Next Big Thing. And he doesn’t want this one to end like the Macintosh-Windows War. This time he has a huge lead, and he has the deep pockets to fight for it, whether that means new product development, strategic acquisitions or all-out legal battles. In the most recent Apple shareholder meeting, he clearly said this: They will use their huge mountain of cash to do everything necessary, every “bold move” needed to keep their lead, and have the whole enchilada for themselves.

There’s no doubt that Jobs will use every single of Apple’s 40 billion dollars to trump Google’s plans, and keep their massive market share in the mobile device and applications world. But for that he will need a strong cloud structure and to get deep into the social aspect of the web. Of the latter, they got nothing. On the former, MobileMe is still a half-baked solution, and iWork.com beta has failed to gain any real traction. Maybe Apple’s traditional enemy—Microsoft—would be able to help there. And maybe getting together with Facebook would slap Google where it hurts more.

On the other side, Google has the lead in the cloud, except for their failed social efforts, which are the target of jokes and extreme criticism. At the same time, while technically good, Android has failed to match the momentum of the iPhone. Android’s app marketplace is still tiny compared to the App Store—and low quality too, by comparison. Apple has an easier time wooing app developers at this point, and that is a big advantage.

Overall, it seems like the two ex-lovers are in a technical tie, and are getting dirtier and bloodier by the day. Sometimes, love ends up like this.

Source: Gizmodo

Blog pioneer Joel Spolsky is shutting down his blog, “Joel on Software,” to concentrate on his software company.  Importantly, Joel is leaving behind, not only a great blog, but some parting shots that we should all take to heart.

You’ve started a business. You’ve built a great product. Now you’re trying to get the word out. You don’t have the budget to buy ads or to retain a PR agency. You’d like to hire a salesperson, but the experienced salespeople are smart enough not to work for you.

Well, there’s always blogging.

These days, it seems like just about every start-up founder has a blog, and 99 percent of these bloggers are doing it wrong. The problem? They make the blog about themselves, filling it with posts announcing new hires, touting new products, and sharing pictures from the company picnic. That’s lovely, darling — I’m sure your mom cares. Too bad nobody else does. Most company blogs have almost no readers, no traffic, and no impact on sales. Over time, the updates become few and far between (especially if responsibility for the blog is shared among several staff members), and the whole thing ceases to become an important source of leads or traffic.

There were far fewer blogs when I set up mine, Joel on Software, 10 years ago (even before I started my company). The site quickly became a popular hub for programmers who wanted to discuss all sorts of things — how to write elegant code, how to deal with unreasonable deadlines, how to get paid more. As the blog grew — eventually, it surpassed one million unique visitors a month in traffic — it also drove interest in my start-up, Fog Creek Software, and our products.

So, what’s the formula for a blog that actually generates leads, sales, and business success? I didn’t even understand it myself until last year at the Business of Software conference, when one of the speakers, a well-known game developer and author named Kathy Sierra, blew me away with an incredibly simple idea that explains why my blog successfully promoted my company while so many other blogging founders foundered.

To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about somethingbigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you’re using a blog to promote a business, that blog can’t be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it’s hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.

So, for example, if you’re selling a clever attachment to a camera that diffuses harsh flash light, don’t talk about the technical features or about your holiday sale (10 percent off!). Make a list of 10 tips for being a better photographer.

If you’re opening a restaurant, don’t blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You’ll attract foodies who don’t care about your restaurant yet.

If you make superior, single-source chocolate, don’t write about that great trip you took to the Dominican Republic to source cocoa beans. That’s all about you. Instead, write the definitive article about making chocolate-covered strawberries. For the next 10 years, whenever a gourmand or a baker searches Google for a recipe on how to make chocolate-covered strawberries, he or she will find your post. Helping your users make awesome chocolate-based confections is likely to attract readers who might buy fancy chocolate, and that’s the point of a successful blog. Writing about trips to the Dominican Republic is going to attract only people who might want to travel to the Dominican Republic. Unless you’re selling that, you shouldn’t be blogging about it.

In retrospect, Joel on Software was essentially a small, perfectly targeted magazine for programmers with a certain pragmatic philosophy toward software development. It was also free advertising for my company, but the advertising actually looked a lot more like editorial content than anything else; the most popular post I ever wrote, for example, was about how technology companies should never, ever rewrite their code from scratch.

Once I had built an audience among programmers, enough of them turned into customers that I was able to get my bootstrapped company off the ground. The audience was so precisely defined that products we tried to make that weren’t specifically for programmers pretty much flopped. They were great products, but they just weren’t for programmers, and we didn’t have a way to market them effectively to nonprogrammers.

Of course, blogging took a ton of my time: It is a manual, labor-intensive, homemade way to reach customers. All told, the work I’ve put into the website and related books, training videos, conferences, and even this column has probably accounted for about a third of the total work I’ve put into Fog Creek Software over the past decade. That’s three or four years of my work life.

Was it worth it? Should you blog?

Well, it worked brilliantly for me, but the more I’ve looked around, the more I’ve noticed that plenty of start-ups have managed to get customers and grow nicely without devoting a huge chunk of their early years to building a cool blog.

What’s more, I have trouble pointing to other successful entrepreneurs who have used the same formula and reaped the same dividends I have.

The big-hit technology companies from the past 10 years tend to have pathetic blogs.Twitter‘s blog, like Facebook‘s and Google’s, is full of utterly boring press releases rewritten to sound a little bit less stuffy. Apple‘s employees produce virtually no blogs, even though the company has introduced several game-changing new products in the past decade. Meanwhile, hundreds of Microsoft‘s employees have amazing blogs, but these have done nothing to stave off that company’s slide into stodginess.

So, having become an Internet celebrity in the narrow, niche world of programming, I’ve decided that it’s time to retire from blogging. March 17, the 10th anniversary of Joel on Software, will mark my last major post. This also will be my last column for Inc. For the most part, I will also quit podcasting and public speaking. Twitter? “Awful, evil, must die, CB radio, sorry with only 140 chars I can’t tell you why.”

The truth is, as much as I’ve enjoyed it, blogging has become increasingly impossible to do the way I want to as Fog Creek has become a larger company. We now have 32 employees and at least six substantial product lines. We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them. And my daily duties now take so much time that it has become a major effort to post something thoughtful even once or twice a month.

The best evidence also suggests that there are many other effective ways to market Fog Creek’s products — and that our historical overreliance on blogging as a marketing channel has meant that we’ve ignored them. I realize now that blogging made me, and Fog Creek, a big fish in a very small pond. As a result, we have the undisputed No. 1 product among the 5 percent to 10 percent of programmers who regularly read blogs about programming. Meanwhile, we’re almost unknown in every other demographic.

My hope is that giving up blogging and the rest of it will be the equivalent of making a cross-eyed kid wear an eye patch on his good eye for a while: The weaker eye will grow stronger. My company needs to get better at what every other company already knows — how to promote and market products without depending on one single channel. We’ve completely saturated a small slice of the target market, and now we have to go after a much larger group of potential customers.

To my readers: Thank you for your attention over the past 10 years. I couldn’t have done it without you, and the nice e-mails, comments, tweets, and blog replies have made it a joyous journey. I enjoyed meeting you virtually, and I look forward to meeting many of you in person in the next phase of my company’s life.

Joel Spolsky is the co-founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software in New York City. He was until this month the host of the popular blog Joel on Software. For an archive of his columns, go to www.inc.com/author/joel-spolsky.

Business: Over the course of many years I have been asked what type of business is best to create and in addition, will draw the most investment from potential investors.  My usual long drawn out answer is in regard to creating companies with big legs, meaning a business that will grow with no stops to her potential.

Over the last year or two, a new term has entered the venture investment arena; “capital efficient.”  By seeking capital efficient, investors are looking for companies that have the potential to take a little capital in and throw a lot of capital out. (no factories here)

So what is the common denominator? Scale.  Mark Maunder over at MM has written a very good piece that makes understanding scale downright simple.  If you are seeking to create in the venture space, the questions he brings up could serve as a good first pass set of hurdle questions.  Either you pass go, or start again…

Having coffee at 4am after an all-nighter with my co-founder and wife a few days ago we came up with a rather obvious but interesting concept. I’ll call it The Sleep Test.

Unless your business earns revenue while you are sleeping, it won’t scale.

If you’re an I.T. consultant or lawyer selling your own time, you can’t scale.

If you’re a brick-layer who employs other brick layers and also employs a sales person, driver, accountant and all the other corporate components so that your business runs while you’re not there, you CAN scale.

If you’re a web developer who writes an application that earns ad revenue or that earns subscription money while you sleep, you CAN scale.

Most enterprises start off with a founder selling their time and with the maximum earnable revenue being tightly limited by the founders available time. The founder works themselves into a stupor and at some point they go through what is often a difficult transition where they “step back” from the business and employ others to take over their various jobs. Many businesses don’t make this transition and it is the subject of much discussion in MBA programs world-wide. The birth of Kinko’s is a great example of this evolution. Paul Orfalea is dyslexic and in the story of Kinko’s he mentions how this forced him to step back from the company and employ others.

Many “Web businesess” or “Software businesses” need to employ a sales team or have components like fulfillment that don’t scale easily or cheaply. But if your business is a “Web App” that earns you money through advertising or through subscriptions and where the application is the business, it scales incredibly well.

Web App businesses scale so well that if you “get it right”, they automatically pass the sleep test from day one and they pass the test without you having to employ additional staff.

Two types of Web App that often pass the sleep test are:

1. A service that attracts huge numbers of an attractive demographic that can earn you ad revenue or
2. A service that is so valuable to a group of people that they will pay you for it, preferably on a recurring basis

Your web app business must also:

1. Not require additional staff time per customer
2. Not require additional staff time per dollar earned
3. Market itself. If it’s marketing is limited by your time, you wont’ scale.
4. Earn you substantially more money than your business costs to run.

And that’s it. You need to build a web application that markets itself, earns more money than it burns and that is either wildly popular or wildly valuable.

If you have a Web App that passes The Sleep Test, congratulations because you have just bypassed one of the most difficult stages of small business evolution and one of the most common points of failure that just about every other business type is forced to navigate.

Final caveat: I’ve written this post discussing this concept in absolutes i.e. you either do or do not pass the sleep test. Of course in reality there is not a single web app business that does not need to employ more staff as their revenue and customer base grows. Google is a fine example of a business that is designed to avoid having to employ more people as revenue or customers grow and they employ over 20,000 people today. But this test is a useful way to measure and think about how efficiently your business will scale.

Source: Mark Maunder

I think we have all heard the Google line, “Do No Evil.”  Tell that to Steve Jobs and a continuing string of others.  What is interesting in the complaint outlined below is that Microsoft is behind two of the complaints filed through new company acquisitions.  So why do we care?  Because the trend is a common one.  Once you gain dominance in a competitive space, your competitors are going to unite and try and take you down.

When I was running Lombard Brokerage and we had won our “Best Online Broker” award from “Smart Money,” within days the other competitors started very similar actions.  Either way, I’d rather be in the lead.  The following was sourced by James Niccolai, IDG News Service, and does not even speak to the three employees convicted in an Italian court today.

Google is being investigated for possible anticompetitive behavior in Europe following complaints filed against it there by three competitors, Google revealed in a blog post Tuesday.

The investigation, which has been described as preliminary, follows complaints filed with the European Commission by a U.K. price comparison site called Foundem, a French legal search engine called ejustice.fr, and a German search site called Ciao that was recently acquired by Microsoft, Google said.

“While we will be providing feedback and additional information on these complaints, we are confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners, as well as in line with European competition law,” Google said.

The Commission, which is the EU’s top antitrust regulator, often conducts a preliminary investigation when it receives complaints about potentially anticompetitive behavior. It typically studies the market in question, interviews companies involved and then decides whether to launch a full investigation. Google appears to be the target of such a preliminary probe.

The search giant implied, but did not say outright, that Microsoft had a hand in two of the complaints.

“Regarding Ciao, they were a long-time AdSense partner of Google’s, with whom we always had a good relationship,” Google said in its blog post. “However, after Microsoft acquired Ciao in 2008 (renaming it Ciao from Bing) we started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions. They initially took their case to the German competition authority, but it now has been transferred to Brussels.”

Foundem complained that Google’s algorithm pushes the shopping site down in its rankings because it considers it a competitor, Google said. Foundem is a member of an organization called ICOMP, Google said, “which is funded partly by Microsoft.”

The complaint from Ejustice.fr is based on similar grounds to the one from Foundem, Google said.

“Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners. This is not the case,” Google said in its posting.

“We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users’ interests first and to compete fair and square in the market. We believe our business practices reflect those commitments.”

Microsoft said it was not surprised to see competition officials looking at the online advertising market, given its importance to the Internet and “the dominance of one player.” It said it had not been notified yet by the Commission about the Google inquiry.

“In the meantime, we continue to cooperate with the German government’s investigation into complaints brought by Ciao, the German Newspaper Publishers Association, Association of German Magazine Publishers, and Euro-Cities, a Berlin-based online mapping company,” Microsoft said in a statement sent via e-mail.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the probe earlier Tuesday, calling it a preliminary investigation that is at the “early, fact-finding stage.”

Google said it decided to discuss the case because it knew it would garner attention in the media.

Source: IDG News Service

Siobhan Gorman of The Wall Street Journal is reporting a massive cyberattack originating in Europe and China affecting thousands of companies.  This is going to be big news, in particular, in light of the attacks that hit Google earlier this year.

Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach.

The damage from the latest cyberattack is still being assessed, and affected companies are still being notified. But data compiled by NetWitness, the closely held firm that discovered the breaches, showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property.

The hacking operation, the latest of several major hacks that have raised alarms for companies and government officials, is still running and it isn’t clear to what extent it has been contained, NetWitness said. Also unclear is the full amount of data stolen and how it was used. Two companies that were infiltrated, pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. and Cardinal Health Inc., said they had isolated and contained the problem.

Source: WSJ

It’s all about Apple and Google these days. From the Nexus One to the iPad, to Eric Schmidt leaving the Apple board, to Apple partnering up with Microsoft for Bing search, to Steve Jobs calling the Google motto “don’t be evil” bull sh**, it seems pretty clear these two titans are both aiming at world domination via a holy trinity of mobile devices, apps, and ads.

AdAge recently put together a great scorecard for the impending Apple vs. Google smack-down, including a comparison of the Nexus One and iPhone devices, operating systems, app stores, and ad platforms. While the Nexus One hasn’t sold nearly as well as the iPhone did after its release, the Verizon Droid has (didn’t know that). My takeaway: regardless of how much of an underdog Google may appear today (I know, that sounds weird), these companies are clearly well matched. Scroll down for all the details.

Apple

Handset: iPhone
Launch date: June 29, 2007
First-month sales: 600,000**
Tagline: “There’s an app for that”
Price: iPhone 3GS $199-$299; iPhone 3G $99
Sold: Online and in Apple and AT&T retail locations
The effect: The iPhone, with 42 million units sold worldwide since its launch, has undoubtedly accelerated smartphone adoption in the U.S. What’s more, it’s created an entirely new content economy with apps. Incidentally, the iPhone is great for Google — with more consumers on the web using their phones, that’s more eyeballs for Google’s search ads. Right now, Google search and maps are default on iPhones. For Apple, the iPhone is a direct extension of the company’s existing product business of computers, laptops and iPods.

Mobile Operating System: iPhone OS
U.S. Smartphone market share: 25%***
Distribution: The iPhone OS runs on iPhones and iPod Touchs worldwide and will soon be on Apple’s new iPad. The iPhone OS is only second in U.S. smartphone market share to Research in Motion, which makes BlackBerry.
Number of apps: More than 140,000
Number of app downloads: More than 3 billion
Developers: More than 120,000

Mobile Ad Network: Quattro Wireless
Price tag: $275 million
Gross revenue for 2009: $20 million*
Market share: 7%*
Leadership: Quattro CEO Andy Miller is now VP-mobile advertising for Apple, reporting directly to Steve Jobs.
Market position: Quattro specializes in rich media and brand mobile ads. Generally, Quattro ads demand a higher cost-per-click on more sophisticated publishers, like on a media company’s app.

Quattro marks Apple’s first foray into advertising. Why would it want to get into the service business? To keep the developers that create the apps that sell iPhones happy. “Apple can now provide 360-degree services for its developers,” said Nihal Mehta, CEO of local-search and networking app Buzzd. “Developers have an easy way to serve ads and monetize their apps without having to maintain relationships with ad networks.”

Web Browser: Safari
Browser Market Share: 4.53%****
Distribution: Safari comes pre-installed on all Apple devices, from Macs to iPhones. It can also be downloaded for Windows machines. Before Apple launched Safari in 2003, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape were the pre-loaded web browsers on Apple machines. Safari curbed Apple’s dependence on Microsoft for web browsing.

Google

Handset: Nexus One
Launch date: Jan. 5, 2010
First-month sales: 80,000**
Launch tagline: “Web meets phone”
Price: $179.99 with T-Mobile 2-year contract; $529.99 for unlocked phone
Sold: Only online

Sales of Google’s first-ever handset have been slow, and might be a symptom of Nexus’s online-only marketing and distribution strategy. Verizon’s Droid, the first Google-branded handset, sold 535,000 handsets in its first month.**

The effect: With Nexus One, Google is trying to diversify its business beyond search, a paradigm of the wired web that may be rendered obsolete if apps become the primary discovery tool on phones. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said the mobile web is his company’s best opportunity for growth. A Google handset is seen as a way to up appeal and adoption of Android, as well as a way to destabilize Apple’s leadership in mobile.

Mobile Operating System: Android
U.S. smartphone market share: 5%***
Distribution: Android has the smallest U.S. smartphone penetration, but the strongest growth in the last quarter of 2009; it’s now on more than 12 devices in 26 countries with 32 carriers in 19 different languages. It’s free and open-source, which means anyone can take Android and add code or download it to create a mobile device without restrictions. Android is Google’s strategy for getting a toehold on lots of phones in lots of places.
Number of apps: More than 20,000
Number of downloads: Not disclosed
Number of developers: “Thousands,” according to a Google spokeswoman.

Mobile Ad Network: AdMob
Price tag: $750 million in stock
Gross revenue for 2009: $31 million*
Market share: 11%*
Leadership: AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui founded the company while in the MBA program at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Market position: AbMob is one of the biggest players in mobile advertising; it has more inventory and a self-service, high-volume model that would dovetail nicely with Google’s AdSense. “AdMob was born to be acquired by Google,” said one mobile-ad executive. Initially, AdMob built its business on cost-per-click campaigns, but has since expanded to premium CPM for brand ads.

The Federal Trade Commission is still reviewing the acquisition. The deal, with its exorbitant price tag — triple what industry bankers and execs had projected — makes Google the mobile-ad leader with 21% mobile search market share.*

Web Browser: Chrome
Browser market share: 5.22%****; 40 million active users in September 2009

Google launched Chrome in late 2008 to make browsing faster, the idea being that it would help internet users search more and, presumably, click Google ads more. Google is in conversations with various PC manufacturers to get Chrome pre-installed on machines; some Sony computers already ship with Chrome.

*According to market research firm IDC.
**Sales data projected by app analytics firm Flurry.
***Market Share data is according to ComScore.
****According to Net Applications, January 2010.

Source: AdAge

Google Buzz is on the attack and who do you think is target # 1?  Facebook is on the defensive and they had better be, because Google shot an flaming arrow through their heart and the twisting has begun.  Please find below an incredibly insightful email from Jason Calacanis, who by the way, earlier stated that the “Buzz” is that Facebook just lost half its value.  Like I always say, “You had better innovate and be willing to eat your own young, or someone else will do it for you.” Should Twitter be worried too?

My 30 second review of Google Buzz:
1. Google Buzz 1.0 is better than Facebook after six or seven years.

2. Facebook’s history is one filled with stealing other people’s
innovations and doing them better (i.e. Zuckerberg has stolen every
idea Evan Williams and the Twitter team have released). How ironic now
that Google has out “Facebooked” Facebook.

3. Google has an excellent privacy record and Facebook is a disaster.
Most folks do not trust Zuckerberg and Facebook any more because of
their privacy record (filled with lawsuits) and because they steal
every good idea they see (i.e. Twitter’s innovations and FourSquare’s
checking in).

4. Google Buzz auto generates your network–this is MUCH better
process than Facebook’s.

5. Google Buzz is way faster than the sluggish Facebook–this is a
HUGE advantage.

6. Google Buzz puts relies and updates into your GMAIL as
threads–this is BRILLIANT and a HUGE advantage.

Facebook is going to see their traffic get cut in half by Google Buzz.

This really is game over for Facebook because you know Microsoft and
Aol are going to copy Google Buzz as quick as they can. In fact, Aol
would have a HUGE renaissance if they simply knocked off Google Buzz’s
exact feature set. You would than have a reason to keep your @aol
email address.

This could actually derail the Facebook IPO. It’s that serious.
Facebook usage is going to plummet in the next year or two because of
this. There really is no reason for non-game playing people who use
GMAIL to log into Facebook.

If Google Ads social gaming to Google Buzz Facebook is 2012′s Pointcast.

Source: Jason Calacanis