Nobody can keep secrets anymore [TechCrunchIT]

Excerpts from Steve Gillmor’s take follow below.  I take issue with the post title, however; it’s pretty clear that Google wasn’t trying to keep the Nexus One secret, and Apple is orchestrating its usual meticulous press choreography in the ramp-up to its January 27th event.  The market shift to real-time streams introduces several new dynamics in terms of information quality and information literacy, but the leading marketing and PR teams have already learned to embrace, and in many cases direct, the new press/blogosphere realities.

The twist is that it’s actually not a competition but a mutual tag teaming of our social services. The key demo today was the voice control of tweets enabled across server side resolution engines. Every single input field on the Nexus One is voice-enabled. Sure, the voice enabled search linked up to the voice-prompted GPS service finances the new device, assuming it can be integrated into bluetooth for hands-free driving. That used to cost $99 for TomTom. But hands-free tweeting over bluetooth is huge, no matter what the anti-social media morons think.

Nexus One creates a viable pool of users trained on a gesture pattern similar enough to the iPhone to be absorbed with perhaps 5 minutes of use. Voice email as absorbed into the micro-message bus creates a huge transaction-ready set of customers who can trade access to their so-called private streams in return for discounts, special offers, and so on — provided the vendors play by the rules. Those rules are not to violate the user’s sense of propriety in the use of their private communications.

Gmail has succeeded because it established a sense of respect for our private communications while at the same time providing context-sensitive information that could be useful. Those links can be scary if you happen to notice how intelligently they are generated based on parsing of your private thoughts and business communications. Yet we understand that Google understands where the fourth wall is, where they can go right up to but not over.

Nobody can keep secrets anymore