I just got back from the Geo-Local Smackdown with @Dylan Clendenin and @Alex Levinson.

Riffing on my thoughts from yesterday regarding the industry as an ecosphere and software as organisms this is how I see the situation. Tonight my friends and I saw 6 little fish swimming in a big pond. Sure they can boast adoption rates of 100,000 a week and userbases of a million or two. But these are shrimp and tuna. The silent Great White swimming in the distance is Facebook.

Not Apple or Google–each with a mobile platform but Facebook with it’s nearly half a billion users. Neither Apple or Google have a network that size with so many interlocking parts. Facebook’s social graph is the ecosphere that each of these 6 little fish tonight are hoping to create.

Make no mistake about it—Facebook is going to turn on geo-location. Trust me. And they will do it in a big platform kind of way. They will in effect become the geo-location reef around which all life grows as well as the bad ass shark that guards it all and feeds on the thriving life. (credit to @Robert Scoble for the idea of a software reef)

It’s clear that 2010 is the year that the mobile web really takes hold. Mobile phones are everywhere. I have 6 staring me in the face as I write this and I am considering buying the new iPhone. Think of each of the phones you see in people’s hands as little fish that swim on the reef. Now think of all these new geo-location companies as bigger fish that are fighting for a chance to eat the data your phone produces. And then picture Facebook at the top of the foodchain.

I see an interesting parallel between Facebook’s situation and Apple. Both are creating thriving reeves. Both are also ruthless preditors that are essentially growing their own ecosystems where they can pick and choose what survives and what dies.

The question in both situations is what does a smart developer do? Do you invest time and money trying to become the 7th or 8th little fish? Or do you become an exotic plant that grows on the reef?

FWIW & for better or worse—after tonight I hold true to my prediction that geo-location will be completely ubiquitous within 5 years—Get ready.

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This evening I gave an hour and a half talk on HTML5 <video> to the Santa Cruz web developers club and I used this picture. It sums up the way I feel about what is happening right now.

Each time we have had a paradigm shift—from mainframes to mini computers, from mini’s to personal computers, from pc’s to laptops, and now from laptops to mobile devices we have seen a 10x increase in users. Those 10x users are the massive wave about to engulf the already tipsy and frail boat which is our industry and world.

There is another label I could give this picture. The lower wave could be iOS and the massive wave could be Android. iOS may be more polished and user friendly as well as up in our face like the little wave is currently upon the boat—but Android is a massive wave rising in the background about to crash down upon our boat and turn the whole thing upside down.

I always think of software like organisms and industries like ecosystems. There are big and little organisms. There are preditors and prey. There are parasitic relationships and symbiotic relationships. And around it all is experimentation and darwinian evolution. In natural ecosystems Nature will try everything imaginable. Once life finds a niche it will maximize adaptation to survive and thrive. That is what I am seeing with Android.

When I was at Google IO with @dylan.clendenin we saw over 60 Android “phones.” There was every style of phone you could imagine. Big phones with touch screens and front and back facing cameras. Small flip phones with no camera and no touch screen. Phones with physical keyboards. Phones with virtual keyboards.

@ Leo Laport reported that there were over 45 Android Tablets that launched 2 weeks ago. Tablets that ranged in size from 15 inches down to 7 inches. Tablets with USB ports and tablets with none. Tablets with front facing camera and back facing cameras and both. Tablets of every shape, style, and price point–all runing Android and all plugged into the Googleverse.

This is digital Nature at it’s finest. Because of Android’s wonderful price of FREE we are witnessing the Cambrian explosion of mobile. And this is only the beginning. Now our phones become intelligent. Who better to harvest all of this information and find meaning in it than the Great Google?

Contrast that with iOS. Yes I will admit that it is better today. By better I simply mean that if you were stuck in an elevator on acid with Android or iOS I think you would have a better trip with iOS.

But iOS is like an industrial mega-farm that grows only roundup ready brocolli. The brocolli is growing and living in an entirely artificial and curated reality. It will grow exactly to its potential maximum because it is being grown by professional farmers. There is no chance for nature to evolve in this environment. And outliers will quickly be culled. Steve Jobs and the boys aren’t going to risk you fucking up their Singularity.

But mono culture leaves no room for experimentation and in an explosion like we are about to experience where we go from the age of mobile computing with 2 to 3 computers per user to the age of ubiquitous computing with thousands of computers per user iOS will be too narrow to fully explore all the potential niches in the ecosphere.

Android is the common DNA that the vast majority of the computers of the future will share.

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Scribd

These are slides from a recent talk I gave on HTML5 video at the Santa Cruz web developers club. Big thanks to Mark Pilgrim and Dive into HTML5 for most of the info for this talk.

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From the post,

“HTML5 is quickly becoming an important part of the Web surfing experience, and according to online ad network Chitika, almost half of all Internet users are already using HTML5-compatible browsers. On Chitika’s network, Firefox (version 3.5 and higher) is the most popular of these HTML5-compatible browsers, followed by Chrome and Safari, with Opera coming in a distant fourth in this race. The league of HTML5-incompatible browsers is mostly comprised of different versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.”

46% of Web Users are Ready for HTML5

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Steve Jobs posted extensively today regarding his feeling and thoughts about Flash and HTML5.

From the post

Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products…

The Full Article: Thoughts On Flash

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