A new Internet Law, named after Bill Gates 

I get more than my share of flack from Google which is really strange because I am a person and they are a multi-billion dollar empire that employs thousands of people.

Sometimes I even win when they try to make me lose.

But you gotta wonder why a big company like Google wants me to lose. Wouldn't it be easier if they outsourced some of the innovation and got the seal of approval you get when someone who's truly independent says there's nothing up your sleeve? Otherwise I'm almost sure there is a hidden agenda. Esp when patents surface on stuff they didn't invent.

Had the same problem with Microsoft, multiple times. Funny how no one makes the pilgrimage to Redmond these days. It seems to me the rest of the world has a say in teh future Mr Google. I said this to Microsoft and now I say it to you. Relax. Kick back. You're going to make 40-plus percent of all the profit that comes from any growth we, outside of Google, are able to create. Maybe even more. You won't get any more growth if you insist on controlling every bit that goes over the wire, in fact you'll get less, because the more you impede overall growth, the less you will grow.

Of course I can't prove this, but it was definitely the right call in the layer before yours. Somehow I think it's a fundamental rule of the growth of the net. The current leader will always try to control growth, and thus slit its own throat. Call that Gates' Law, because he both discovered it (as it applied to IBM) and fell victim to it (in his struggle to control the web).

BTW, to Aaron Swartz, who says Google is much less of a sociopath than Microsoft. I don't actually think so. Microsoft wasn't as bad as you seem to think. They didn't interfere with 99 percent of all Windows apps. They certainly never tried to control the platform anywhere as completely as Apple tries to control iPhone apps today. I think it's very nice of Google not to screw around with search results. I also think if they did, they'd instantly fall apart.

Another BTW, in showing us the future Google Toolbar and Feedburner, yesterday, Google presented a classic Embrace & Extend. You can tweet your links to Twitter, and a number of other places. At some point they will add Google's Twitter clone to the list (unless they acquire Twitter of course). No matter what it will be the default. You can feel its presence. Not a bad thing. A way of reminding Twitter that they are still very much one of us. Might end up being a very good thing.

Build to flip? 

Lots of interesting developments yesterday, and I'm glad to have a front row seat. Actually in some cases I have a seat in the dressing room, so I have to be pretty careful about what I say.

First, New York has become much more interesting in the tech world. I spent just two days hopping from rock to rock, and didn't land on most of them, but wow, there's something going on there.

In New York as on the west coast, some companies are built to flip, meaning they don't intend to be standalone companies. They were just building features or market share, intending to be bought by a big company, probably Google.

Pretty sure that bit.ly, a company I played a role in founding, was running a Build To Flip plan. I think we found out yesterday that it didn't work.

I think in general, even if your plan is to flip, you should run a company as if no one will buy it. That your liquidity will come in the form of profit from sales of services and products to users. It's good discipline. Keeps the team focused on who and what's important.

Had bit.ly been running such a program, they would be a lot further along with Bit.ly Pro, a service they announced yesterday, probably in response to Google's announcement of their URL-shortener. (If it wasn't a response it was an incredible coincidence in timing.)

My issue with bit.ly is the instability it adds to an already-fragile Internet. They removed one element of the fragility yesterday, or showed how they plan to remove it. You don't want every link on the realtime net to go through one domain. Now you can have your links go through your own domain. But I have a better deal with Adjix, one that removes the other part of the stability problem -- they also mirror my data to a bucket that I own on Amazon S3. So, if god forbid something bad should happen to Adjix or Joe Moreno, I just point the r2.ly domain at the bucket and everything keeps working. No broken links. Should both Amazon and Adjix fail, and there's still an Internet (a fair question) I can take the data and move it to another server and it will work just as well there. All it depends on is Apache or some other static HTTP server. When bit.ly does that, they will really have a Pro version. This announcement is a Band Aid, to stop the bleeding after Google (presumably) said no to buying them.

Back to New York.

The big question I have for the brilliant young tech startups of New York is this -- are you trying to become an outpost of Silicon Valley or are you wanting to build a new layer on tech, independent of the west coast?

BTW, it's not all a rotten mess on the west coast. I have become a huge admirer of Matt Mullenweg and Automattic in the last year (not that I wasn't already smitten before). They did two beautifully disrupting things in 2009 all while growing their freemium cash-generating business -- they implemented rssCloud and the Twitter API. And the year still ain't over.