The future of the Web is Marc Canter’s back fence

Yesterday I visited Marc Canter who was holding a BBQ. His back fence is, should we say, unique. Canter is the guy who started Macromind, which became Macromedia. He’s always been ahead of the market in recognizing where things are going. Plus he’s just fun to talk with. So, I filmed him showing off his new book and his fence. The neat thing is while we were filming that we had people participating from around the world on my little cell phone. Even now the chat room is open, so you can participate in this fun project called the live web. Sorry about the abrupt end, the 3G went away. 36 minutes, but it’s not boring. How could it be with that shirt that Marc is wearing!

Earlier in the day I got David Schmidt, CTO of PBWiki, to show me his new OpenID keyfob from Yubikey. That thing is very cool. Using that he can securely sign into all his OpenID services (like WordPress, for instance, or PBWiki) just by shoving this into his USB port and pushing a button. No more remembering passwords that are strange and long.

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Mike Arrington and Steve Gillmor don’t use Firefox 3.0

Tonight I was at a party where Mike Arrington, Steve Gillmor, and me were talking to Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla Foundation. You know, the fine folks who make the Firefox browser. During the conversation they admitted they don’t yet use Firefox 3.0.

Me? That’s ALL I use and I love it. I can’t wait for it to launch. Brendan said they don’t know the exact time yet that they will launch but gave strong indications it would be sometime next week.

Interesting that Walt Mossberg DOES use Firefox 3.0 and gave it a ringing endorsement, one that I can definitely add onto. There’s no better browser out there. None. On my Mac I love it a lot more than Safari.

Cool new forum hosting/service: Lefora

I just visited the offices of Lefora, free forum hosting, who is making cool new forum software that goes in interesting new directions that I haven’t seen forum software or services do yet. Stuff like embeddable YouTube videos with just copying the URL. And I +love+ the color theme selector they have.

You’ll see that in the video demo I just filmed with Vinnie Lauria, VP of product.

Paul Bragiel, CEO, told me a lot more about the company and its plans in a separate video.

An example of their new forums can be found on their “fun stuff forum.”

UPDATE: In just a few minutes Vinnie created me a forum.