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You might not know Eric Norlin but I’ve been following him for a long time. He’s one of the folks who started the Digital ID World conference and is now senior editor there. Now he’s starting a new Internet-focused conference called “Defrag.” I caught him in one of the back rooms at the Digital ID World and we have a fun 42 minute conversation about all sorts of things.

If you are thinking of planning a conference you won’t want to miss this one. We cover the economics of putting on conferences. We also talk about a ton of stuff.

This is a continuation of “smart people week” on ScobleShow. Heh, it’s actually always smart people week, but it’s fun just to do a conversation like this with a smart guy who runs major industry conferences. Hope you enjoy.

I’m already getting sick of all the talk that the Jaiku acquisition by Google means the death of Twitter. Of course where is this talk happening? Twitter! Heh.

Tim O’Reilly put it right: Jaiku’s strength wasn’t as a competitor to Twitter at all. It was the mobile presence and aggregation features that I liked over on Jaiku. Jaiku has a mobile client, in particular, that’s really great.

The more troubling thing is that Google acquires companies and then we never hear about these companies again. Will that happen to Jaiku? I hope not.

As Jonathan Davies says, Jaiku’s other strength is in aggregating RSS feeds into one place. Interesting that Google is building a very strong position in the RSS ecosystem with Google Reader and Feedburner and now Jaiku. Interesting, will Google use its RSS position against Facebook? We’ll see come November 5.

Imagine if Google made a more open social networking tool than Facebook all via RSS feeds? Stick that into your RSS feed reader and smoke it!

Anyway, I’ve had a Jaiku account for a while and like it. Hope to see what they do next.

I was talking with a Google employee last night at the Graphing Social Media conference.

Aside: why are there more Google employees there than Facebook ones? I think Facebook’s attitude toward the community is saying volumes to all of us.

Anyway, he asked me to guess which Google service had the most page views every day.

Is it search? No.
Blogger? No.
Google Maps? No.
Picasa? No.

So, what is it?

Orkut.

Orkut?

Yeah. Now do you get why they just bought Jaiku?

Now do you get why the world is going to pay attention to what Google releases on November 5?

Yeah!

Facebook has real competition coming. Competition they haven’t yet faced.

It’s going to be an interesting period to watch them go at it.

I have 552 reasons to hate Facebook. I sure wish they would let me add more than 5,000 friends. If Google doesn’t have such a stupid limit that’ll get me to check it out, at minimum (I can’t add any more friends on Facebook).

A few months ago I interviewed the Jaiku founders. I found them to be very smart. This is a good purchase for Google. Add it onto their new social network that’s coming (Orkut 2.0) and Google just made a major move against Facebook.