I'm going to say it was 2005 or 2006.

I was having lunch in San Francisco with Dean Hachamovitch and Robert Scoble. This was when Scoble was working at Microsoft. We were probably talking about RSS, because Hachamovitch, who I've known for many years, was then running Microsoft's browser team, and they were making a big push into RSS. They wanted my endorsement, which I sort of gave, even though they didn't take my advice.

Anyway, as we were leaving the restaurant, all of a sudden we're talking with Steve Jobs. I have no recollection of who saw who, or who said what to whom to get this conversation going. And it wasn't really a conversation cause Jobs did all the talking. He was telling Dean how they were doing all this cool stuff that Microsoft was certainly going to steal so they should pay attention. Jobs complained that Microsoft never does anything original and is always stealing ideas from Apple.

I tried to stay out of Jobs's line of sight.

You know what he was ranting about? Podcasting.

Actually a reallllly nice moment, in a Jobsian way.

Maybe Dean or Scoble remember some other part of the discussion.

 3/13/2012; 7:45:44 PM.

Yahoo sucks. They sued Facebook for patents. Sigh.

I would be up in arms if that's all there was. If patents weren't already gumming up the works in other areas.

And anyway, why should I care. It's not as if these companies, all of them, Facebook very much included, aren't just bubble gas, top to bottom.

Twitter is all bubble gas too. The money is real, to the extent that money is real -- but the companies are jokes. The whole thing is based on doing to users what Yahoo is doing to Facebook.

Sell products and services to people, and then you have a right to get indignant when a sorry crippled hand-me-down like Yahoo turns into a patent troll.

There are only a handful of companies in this industry that are set up to survive the bubble pop. Apple and Amazon, are probably the two strongest ones. Why? They earn profits from selling products to users. Bing.

 3/13/2012; 7:16:05 PM.