Robert Scoble

This helps you speed up my videos so you can watch them in less time. Cool idea!

"You look like one of those nerds," Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble says. Why thank you very much!

Turns out Google Glass still works, even after putting a sticker on the touch surface.

What does it mean to be an American?

This pisses me off a lot more than anything the NSA is doing.

Our culture and society are broken. In a whole lot of ways.

I've been thinking a LOT about what it means to be an American lately. Are we free? Really free? No. Not when people are getting sent to jail for five years for, um, selling a plant to other people. Think about that for a moment. Selling a plant.

Sigh. Makes me want to buy a Pax Vaporizer. Speaking of which, a TON of entrepreneurs have been talking to me about Pax but few want to be public about what a cool startup Ploom is. At concerts in Silicon Valley you see these all over the place. It's one of those things no one likes talking about because of America's screwed up beliefs and attitudes about drugs.

Hey: privacy folks, this is how you should be framing the problem of letting the NSA have pretty unfettered power to spy on us.

Let's be honest, the NSA got the power to spy based on the good intentions of stopping terrorists, but we all know what they are gonna do with that power along with drones, etc. Come after the "stoners."

And I've seen up close and personal what marijuana does for cancer patients. I'm sure medical marijuana cards are being misused, but it DOES help many people medically.

The next civil rights movement is this.

Do we want to really be free? Let's start right here.

"We're friends on Facebook and we've never met," said Avish Bhama when he introduced himself when my son, Patrick Scoble and I were enjoying a latte at Coupa Cafe - Palo Alto. He then made a nice photo of us with my Glass. What a crazy world we live in where we can be "friends" without even meeting, huh?

Oh, and Coupa accepts Bitcoin.

I wonder, if we could time travel and go back in time 30 years would anyone be able to grok this conversation "in the future you will be able to buy coffee with bitcoin while talking to a friend you never have met, all while Google'ing him on your wearable computer, called Glass."

That's how I know we don't have time travelers amongst us. Imagine how our language will change in just the next 20 years.

We're just as clueless about the future today as we were 20 years ago.

Did NSA news change our behavior? Danny Sullivan does a great analysis. Love Duck Duck Go, though. One problem with being private, though, is Google Now works better when you do all your searches on Google. Ahh, in the age of context we will be incentivized to let it all hang out.

So, you have a choice: don't be tracked or have cool features work properly. Me? I just let it all hang out. How about you?

The sky overhead is rarely this color in Half Moon Bay. What a great day, hung out at Google with the Glass team. Hope you are having a great weekend.

Join us live now. Might talk about Instagram video. But probably will find something geekier than that to talk about with Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Keith Teare, and you.

Ahh, Rackers always want to test new stuff out. Here you see our slide inside our San Antonio headquarters, shot with the new Instagram video features. Nice and steady!

Facebook has a deeper problem than just Vine/Twitter. Kudos to Instagram on adding videos and a neat steadicam feature, but in this photo you can see the problem Facebook has: it's starting to look ugly compared to Google+ and Flipboard, amongst others.

Here's two of my screens. One with Google+. One with Facebook. Google+ is just getting better and better. Photos, on Google+, are stunning, when compared to the same photo uploaded to Facebook (because Google+ can deal with higher resolutions, and automatically increases the quality).

Another problem? I have the new Facebook design of newsfeed. But most people in my life still have the old design. The old design looks even uglier than my feed.

If there's a danger at Facebook it's the assumption that Facebook has us all locked in and we aren't going to go elsewhere. Well, Google+ used to be a ghost town. It no longer is. So SOMEONE moved over there (in just the past minute 84 posts flowed into my screen from 5,000 friends over there).

This focus on design at Google is showing up in mobile, too.

Is this a problem for Facebook? Not today, I agree. But long term? These trends are troubling. If Google takes back the high-value users then that's very troubling to Facebook. Already kids have moved a lot of their online behaviors away from Facebook and to things like all the chat/messaging apps and Vine (which beat Facebook by many months).

I believe this stuff is already affecting Facebook's stock price. Why? Investors can see that Facebook is feeling old and tired and isn't seeming to be that innovative.

If I were an exec at Facebook, like Sheryl Sandberg, I would be VERY troubled by all this. It's not enough to have a hacker culture anymore. You have to have a design culture, too. It's amazing that Google is getting the upper hand at that.