I've been to so many big earth-shaking events from BigTechCo's -- today's Google thing is making me yawn, while my eyes glaze over in boredom.

Here's how products like this are conceived:

1. We need to kill Facebook.

2. What will we do.

3. It can't just be Facebook.

4. No one will use that.

5. It has to be better.

6. It has to be something only we can do.

7. Some place where we have the advantage.

8. Something people have no choice but to use.

So if you're Microsoft in 1999, you bake it into Windows.

If you're Google in 2011, you bake it into search.

All you do is make your core product heavier. The thing you wanted to kill doesn't go anywhere. It hardly notices what you did. The users might care to the extent that they're annoyed (or in the case of wordpress.com and their fear of being left out of the iPad, hugely annoyed).

The thing that makes Facebook great is that it incubated in the market with real users. It was made by real users. It was formed by actual use. One day at a time, one feature at a time, in public, every home run visible, and every mis-step.

Products like the one Google just announced are hatched at off-sites at resorts near Monterey or in the Sierra, and were designed to meet the needs of the corporation that created it. A huge scared angry corporation. What little is left of the spark that created it in the first place is now used to being Number One, and wants to feel that again. It's being created to make that person feel better.

Eventually they will become an investment bank and a services company. The fate for all former high-flying techco's.

Yawwwwwwwwwwn.

PS: Apparently the software exists and people are using it. Hmmm.

Followup: Page's mistake.

 6/28/2011; 1:26:41 PM.   .

Second podcast in 9 hours. 

Who thought I would have so much to say!

Number 6 is about Joe Hewitt, Guy Kawasaki, win-wins, and real evangelism.

It's possible for a developer to love the platform vendor and vice versa. But you need a front-man like Guy Kawasaki and a behind-scenes guy like Mike Boich. Apple had both in 1984, and together they invented technology evangelism.

Since then evangelism has come to mean bullying or pontificating or being a goon squad for your cause. Ugh.

Developers want romance. A hug and a kiss and a squeeze.

Special bonus: I sing a refrain from Alice's Restaurant.

 6/28/2011; 9:58:44 AM.   .

Quick note with a pointer to last night's DaveCast, the fifth. 

In this podcast, I explain why I'm doing these podcasts, now. Quick answer, to support the innovative work my buddy Adam Curry is doing with his community. We're having fun creating an amateur talk radio network based on two cool technologies: Dropbox, and my own Blork (which is both a podcaster and catcher, in addition to being an RSS-based blogging tool).

Yes ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this stuff actually works.

 6/28/2011; 8:48:55 AM.   .