Brilliant videos. Demonstrates just how bad Apple is behaving toward developers.

TechCrunch also just announced a TechMeme related piece of news. New top blogs list coming out. That’ll be very interesting.

Adobe tonight is announcing that they’ve bought Virtual Ubiquity, makers of the very cool BuzzWord (which is now open for public trials). For the details, go and see TechCrunch’s post cause I’m too lazy to write up all the news word-for-word (I was driving when I got the call, so might have missed some important detail and we were both embargoed until 9 p.m. tonight — I’m sure this news will be covered in depth by tons of bloggers) I saw this at an Adobe event a few months ago and wondered why it hadn’t been acquired yet cause it’s a lot nicer than what other companies have shown me so far like Google’s Docs.

Adobe also announced a cool new widget that’ll make sharing files easy, especially PDFs, which will be automatically rendered by this new widget. I’ll play around with that and see how it compares to some of the others from places like Microsoft’s Folder Share and Box.net, among others.

I was briefed on Friday by Adobe and asked them whether this represented a new strategy for Adobe and whether or not we’d see more acquisitions. The non-committal answer on the other end of the phone told me the answer. Look for Adobe to make other moves in the near future to dive further into the deep end of the Web 2.0 Work 2.0 pool.

Don’t pay attention to what Adobe is doing here, though. Alone it doesn’t seem all that significant (even though, to me, it represents a real shift in strategy and an interesting one, to boot). But, rather, look at the bigger “Work 2.0″ trend that’s underway here. I doubt that any one company will end up owning a monopoly share the way that Microsoft really controlled Work 1.0. It’s rare that I see an office worker who isn’t using Microsoft’s Office. Walk through an airport and on almost system you’ll see Outlook/Excel/PowerPoint/Word.

But, I love the new collaboration software that’s coming along. The trend got moving with Skype, but includes things like Zoho’s Office suite, Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets, the recent purchase of Zimbra (now owned by Yahoo), Edit Grid, Etelos, Atlassian, Skitch, 37 Signals (Basecamp, etc), 30 Boxes, ThinkFree, SmartSheet, Spresent, Grand Central or Callwave, Vyew, Stixy, and Concept Share. I’m sure I’m missing stuff, please add in your own favorites to the comments here and I’ll keep updating my post.

Or, as Jake Luer says: anything that keeps 18 versions of the same doc out of my inbox (I asked everyone tonight about what services came to mind when I said “Work 2.0.”).

These new services let you work with people in a whole new way. No more emailing around Word Docs or Spreadsheets or PowerPoints. Instead you pass around a URL, and work there.

Now, is Microsoft in trouble? No. Office is going to sell well for quite a few years still.

But there is blood in the water. If you try all these companies listed in this post you can work together with people in new ways that simply aren’t possible using Microsoft stuff.

Anyway, Adobe tonight just added onto the pile. This is significant. It’s amazing to me that Microsoft is letting all this competition build up strength and power. How long before people other than the “insiders/early adopters” start switching over to these newer services? I know I’m using Microsoft stuff less and less. There IS blood in the water even if only the early sharks can smell it.

UPDATE: More on TechMeme about these announcements.

UPDATE2: Microsoft itself is working on an online collaborative word processor, Mary Jo Foley says. Again, don’t get waylaid by the word processing announcements here. The bigger picture is more important.

What a fun week. Milan has proven I can love something more than I love blogging. Well, heck, Twitter and Flickr proved that too (that’s where I’ve been spending a lot of my online time this week, check out my new photos — we had a fun day yesterday with Dave Winer. In two weeks with my new camera I’ve already made 36 GBs worth of images, whew! Then compare to Patrick’s photos. He’s pretty good with the 5D).

Twitter has really turned into something special. It’s how I keep in touch with my friends and the world. I find I like spending a lot more time there than on my blog because of the immediacy.

So, let’s get back into it. Tonight there’s a couple companies announcing news. Come back at shortly after 9 p.m.

One of the companies speaks to the future of development. Four years ago I predicted that within 10 years very few people would be doing standard old Win32 style development. At the time I thought that Vista would be a lot more popular than it turned out to be and that the world would shift toward .NET development. I was wrong. The truth is that Web work is becoming far more popular than i thought it would be. Every startup lately is showing me Web work and, while some use .NET, most use LAMP on their servers.

Anyway, see ya tonight and don’t miss the Photowalking at Stanford University tomorrow. It looks like a huge crowd will be there.

When I visited Carnegie Mellon I met Randy Pausch. He was inspirational then (developed a new programming language, Alice, which was aimed at helping kids learn to program). But now, he’s even more inspirational. You gotta watch this video (WMV format). It’s his last lecture. Has pancreatic cancer.

More about this talk and Randy over on Metafilter.

Tons of people on Twitter are reporting problems with their iPhones. Including my son. Including Jeff Clavier. Anyone else having this problem? These are people who have not unlocked their iPhones. I’m about to update mine and will report what happens. A bunch more reports are over on TechMeme and Dave Winer is tracking them too.

How about you? How did your update of your iPhone go?

Oh, and Patrick’s iPhone lost all of its data. Made worse because his Mac had a bunch more problems (this is the second time it’s been in the shop) and so he’s praying now that Apple didn’t delete everything off of his hard drive.

UPDATE: My iPhone update seems to have gone well. New icon on home screen says “iTunes.” Meanwhile the Twitters from people with updates that didn’t go well continue to come in. Here’s another one.

Here’s my photos from the Halo 3 Launch party last night in Silicon Valley. Guy Kawasaki has a better post, though.

It was a great party, glad I talked Maryam into letting me go. Thanks to Daniel for coming along. Good vibe and lots of smiles.

Wow, I go to lunch with my parents and the entire world shifts due to a Wall Street Journal report that Microsoft may buy part of Facebook which would value Facebook at $10 billion or so.

Too bad that Microsoft’s management didn’t listen to Jeff Sandquist and others two years ago.

Funny, you know Dave Morin? He works at Facebook on the app platform now but used to work at Apple. He told me that he tried to get Apple to pay attention too. But got frustrated with Apple’s inability to get Facebook. So, he left to join Facebook.

What’s funny, he told me, is now a good percentage of Apple employees are on Facebook. At the latest Apple press conference I noticed that Steve Jobs even showed off the iPhone Facebook app on stage.

As talked about earlier, here’s the FeedHub videos.

Interview.

Demo.

Read/WriteWeb has a good preview of companies to watch at DEMOfall 2007, which starts today in San Diego, CA. Here’s the full list of all the presenters coming this week.

I think they missed one that’s worthy of including, though: SceneCaster. Mashable has a writeup of SceneCaster. I’ll have a video of them up soon.

Why? SceneCaster is aimed at Second Life. But it gets rid of some of the real negatives that Second Life has. What are those negatives?

1. You can’t get more than about 80 people into any one space. This makes it very tough to use Second Life for commercial experiences. SceneCaster doesn’t have those limitations.
2. You can’t embed Second Life onto Web pages or Facebook profiles. SceneCaster lets you do just that, which makes it far easier to navigate around for novices.
3. SecondLife isn’t well integrated into other Web stores of 3D objects. SceneCaster integrates Google’s 3D Warehouse.
4. Kids are kept out of the main grid in Second Life where on SceneCaster each scene is controlled by the owner. So my scenes will allow kids in and others might have different rules.
5. Because each scene is embeded into a Web page we can link to scenes a lot easier than we can link to them on Second Life.

What doesn’t it do that Second Life will? It isn’t a complete world the way Second Life is, although that world gets people lost which causes high churn rates of people who try it for a while and get bored and leave before discovering that there’s a world that might keep their attention.

Downside? Windows only right now (they are working on a Mac version).

Any other Demo companies that we should pay attention to?

Let’s do what we did with TechCrunch 40 last week. I’ll pick SceneCaster as my favorite company that I’ve seen so far.

Anyone want to pick the company that’ll get the most hype coming out of Demo?

Oh, and there’s a TON of news coming through the feeds this morning due to Demo. I’ve put the best stuff on my link blog.

Another cool thing that Read/WriteWeb didn’t mention? YourTrumanShow, which now will be called “VideoMap.” Mashable wrote that up too.