He says nearly everything I’d say. I’ll only add that:

1. My “Twitter + payments” thesis would flourish at Google, and help Google Checkout compete against Paypal.

2. Google’s biggest asset is searching all of the history of the web; their achillies heel in search (if they have one) is most likely the “real time” element that Twitter provides and is land-grabbing right now.

3. I don’t think Twitter would sell for only $1 billion. After a first quarter of 2009 as good as theirs, they are going to over value themselves, and if $1 billion makes sense to Henry — even though they’ve more than tripled in size after receiving an offer half the size — then their strike point in this deal is likely much closer to $2 billion.

Silicon Alley Insider recently issued a challenge:

Despite strong traffic and passionate users, Digg’s revenues blow. During the first three quarters of 2008, Digg saw about $6.4 million on 30 million monthly uniques and lost $2 million. Yuck.

Today we’re launching the Fix Digg’s Miserable Business Contest.

The winning submission will ideally include steps to implement the plan, revenue projections based on real numbers, helpful visuals (like a deck) and clean prose. We’ll judge submissions based on their creativity, clarity and plausibility.

The prize? … We’ll personally pass the winners’ plan and resume to our friends at Digg: CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose.

Contest? I love contests! (I also love proposing really smart revenue models.)

Anyway, today was the deadline to submit, so I took an hour and I threw up some ideas I’ve been thinking about in an intentionally cheesy-looking Power Point (see above or here).

Lo and behold, my deck was one of the top five selected by Alley Insider today.

Now, I don’t generally try to sound too headstrong, but my idea is really the only reasonable one up there; so, when you vote (click through to vote), do Digg a favor and vote for my deck (#1).

But in all seriousness, my idea for Digg — to sell in-line “Sponsored Article” listings on a CPC or eCPM basis — is a really good one: not because it’s my idea (I refer to it as the “Techmeme Model,” so clearly I don’t think it’s my idea) or because I don’t think Digg hasn’t thought of it (how could they not), but because I think it’s the right thing to do, not only for Digg their bottom line, but also for Digg’s users!

Going back aways, my friend Charlie posted a idea for a service to “Grease This Post.” In the article, he wrote:

How great would it be if, right next to the publish button, there was another button that said, “Do you want to invest $10 in driving relevant traffic to this post?”  The money could be used to not only do search placement, but sponsored placement as “Suggested sponsored links” in front of bloggers talking about the same things.

Amen, Charlie.

If Digg allowed brands, publishers, and indy bloggers to “grease” their posts and press releases, it would not only command super-high eCPMs for Digg, but also provide a new tool for Digg’s users.

And Digg doesn’t have to allianate their users in the process!

Back at FOWA Miami 2008, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress explained that WordPress does put advertising on its publishers’ pages, but because they only target infrequent visitors, most users never see them.

With Digg, one could assume that only 10% of pageviews come from registered users, and only 1% from hardcore power users (90/10/1 is a common ratio for User Generated Content (UCG) sites like Digg).

What’s special about Digg, is that while that fat 90% of visitors isn’t necessarily registered, they are there to discover new content.

This puts Digg is a great position to power paid discovery for publishers and brands and reach a huge majority of users (visitors) without alienating the notoriously Digg-is-a-temple set of power users.

Anyway, I think it’s a great model. To start, Digg would have to build a simple tool for folks to create and target ads with. It should be self-service to begin with and Digg should experiment with CPM and CPC models to see what works best for the advertisers.

Anyway, I thought that while we were all suggesting new board members for the bruised-up tech company we’re all coming around to love (I am), we should put all the nominations in one place and get some sort of intlligence out of them.

So, I turned to BricaBox.

Since BricaBox is like a wiki with social and data intelligence, I just replicated the Alley 100 People’s Choice and created this:

Yahoo! Board People’s Choice

Please join me in nominating your choice for the new Yahoo! Board. And, if you have any questions or concerns about BricaBox, please let me know.

1. Twinkle
2. AppleTV
3. Silicon Alley Insider
4. Meetup / The Point / CarrotMob
5. DonorsChoose & Kiva

Twinkle

No need to put the iPhone or Twitter on my list, because the Twinkle application (jailbroken phones only, for now) combines both of these tools and highlights what is most revolutionary about these two phenomenons.

On the surface, Twinkle is just an iPhone client for Twitter, and has an appearance much like the popular desktop client called Twitterific. However, its ability to tap into the iPhone’s GPS/location API, as well as it’s tie-in with the phone’s camera turns the device in your pocket into a geiger counter for social ambiance.

What do I mean? When I open Twinkle, I can press the “Near Me” button and find recent messages and photos posted by folks right near me – whether I know them or not (coincidentally, my friend Patrick Ewing had just messaged as I took this screenshot).

This is a significant departure from other location-based social platforms — like Dodgeball, Socialight, and BrightKite — because I am passively being introduced to things occurring in my surrounding, while I’m out and about, rather than just connecting with people I already know when they “check in” or leave geo-specific notes. Instead, these are people chatting away as usual, just with the added meta-data (and thus context) of location and images.

It’s about the meta-data, not the data!

(My friend Chris Messina wrote more about this, by the way.)

So, this is Twinkle today — very cool — but the Twinkle of the future (or whatever succeeds it) will have more meta-data and more open data (location based data will be shared via Fire Eagle or some other broker/standard), and it will also incorporate more data sources (Upcoming.com’s data could alert you to something happening next to you; Facebook’s data could tell you when you’re near a friend of a friend).

This is the future.

AppleTV

Quick multiple choice exam folks. “Podcasts” have:

1. Been predicted to really break out in 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 …
2. Are delivered via open standards (RSS), which means anyone can publish a podcast
3. Have been adopted by major media, with little success outside public radio example
4. Are good for major media because they get to control the source files thus ad inventory
5. Very hard to monetize without critical mass, because getting everyone on one ad platform is hard
6. For consumers, they are conceptually tethered to iTunes and the iPod (thus the name), creating a glass ceiling for adoption 
7. All of the above

The answer, of course, is 7 — “All of the above.”

But the AppleTV changes everything you knew about podcasts, new media distribution and new media consumption.

While this first started last fall when a firmware upgrade included access to YouTube’s library of videos — the first time user generated content could be consumed in a “lean back” environment — the “this is the future” change came in early February, when the device upgrade included a entirely new interaction around it’s 100,000 feed library of podcasts.

This new interaction — which most importantly allowed the user to watch/listen to shows “on demand” (actually an interaction first introduced by Odeo) — eliminated the clumsy necessity to “subscribe” to a feed, only to listen or view the episode you really wanted. Finally, you could view a podcast episode on-demand.

AppleTV finally lets you surf the video web like you watch TV. Lean back AND surf a never-ending, democratized base of content.

That’s powerful. See that screenshot above? Yeah, that’s my friend Gary’s show, WineLibraryTV, featured next to Larry King — on my TV? How ridiculous is that?!

That’s the future.

Silicon Alley Insider

Okay… roll you eyes… Nate is a contributing writer for Silicon Alley Insider and calling them the future. What a jerk!

But wait! Silicon Alley Insider is not the future, but their approach to journalism certainly is!

What happens when you take professional writers, make them use the veracity-threshold of old media but act like a blog and play with bloggers!?

Folks, if journalism has a future, this is it. Online versions of newspapers are boring and emulating them makes you just as boring; meanwhile, blogs are often amateur, and relying on them will often leave you misinformed.

But, professional blogs, like Insider, combine the best of both worlds… and create a go-to spot for information you NEED to know in a format you CAN easily consume.

Kara Swisher and AllThingsD is another fantastic example of this (she has complete editorial and operational independence from WSJ, though is funded by them).

As traditional newsrooms crumble across America, expect to see more of these hybrid opening up and competing.

They are the future.

Meetup and its followers

Scott Heiferman said the only thing that really stuck with me at last year’s Personal Democracy Forum. He said, “The revolution will not be on YouTube.”

Indeed it won’t. Still today, the most powerful things that happen are when people — real people — organize and do something together, in the same location. As powerful as Obama’s online fundraising has been, think about how he bootstrapped his grassroots fundraising: by getting large groups assembled, and asking them to donate, in whatever amount they could, some money to his campaign. News reports of tens of thousands-strong demonstrations, even through Barack’s toughest weeks of the campaign, propelled him closer to the nomination — not to mention the people gathering at polls to vote for him.

In fact, in a world where people can just stay at home, donate and phone-bank from their couch, getting people together matters more than ever!

Anyway, Meetups are a great example of this, but there are many new technologies facilitating group action in new exciting way; including:

• The Point — think of this service as “tipping point insurance” for group action. What does that mean? With this service you register a goal and ask people to sign-on to the goal. The catch is this: no one has to do anything around that goal (give money, boycott, march, etc) unless the right number of people sign up too. A one man march doesn’t mean anything, and a Million Man March only works if a million men show up and are counted. 
• CarrotMob — At this point, CarrotMob is more and idea plus one example, but it’s pretty compelling. Check out this video:

I started with a quote from Scott Heiferman, so I’ll end with something he recently went on record saying:

This kind of thing… – inventions in group-power — will have more impact on the future than anything.

I agree. This is the future.

Donors Choose and Kiva

In general terms, charity organizations have always had great intentions, but they’ve also been terribly inefficient at delivering on their missions because of administrative, supply-chain, and other inefficiencies – and donors are catching on.

Luckily, organizations like DonorsChoose.org and Kiva.org are revolutionizing the word of philanthropy, and are leveraging the web to make giving feel good again.

So what’s the magic of Donors Choose and Kiva? They’re great examples of “Just in time Philanthropy” (cool! Google says I just coined this term).

With DonorsChoose.org, teachers register their classroom needs, and people/philanthropists sign-up to meet those needs by donating the exact amount for the project. Then, the money goes straight into the hands of those teachers, with relatively lightweight administration in between. Ask for a pencil and thee shall get a pencil!

With Kiva, I can loan money directly to a business man in a developing country — the agency doesn’t decide what to do with my money, the recipient does. They’re just there to make the process run smoothly.

I’d like to see how this model could be extended into other important realms of philanthropy, like food banks.

Why organize a food drive, have a bunch of people bring a bunch of random food to one location, and then find a way to transport that food to a foodbank that does or does not need what you’ve gathered?! We should take the Donors Choose model, have food banks tell us what they want, and then buy that food on Fresh Direct to be delivered on site! If Fresh Direct had an API like Amazon’s we could put this in place and eliminate entire agencies, getting more of the right food in the right hands, directly from those who are giving!

In general, the Internet allows us to be much more direct in our actions and, in many cases, nearly eliminates the need for bloated agencies and NGOs.

“Just in time Philanthropy” is most definitely the future!

The importance of veracity.

Earlier today, the biggest story on TechMeme and beyond was that Twitter had begun testing, at long last, in-stream ads on its website; at least that’s how TechCrunch’s oft-debunked Duncan Riley reported things.

But alas, this story, was like so many that Duncan and other amateur reporters commit to their blogs, was fully erroneous, and Silicon Alley Insider, a publication which tends to fact-check (an antique practice I’ll get to later) sent out a few emails and debunked the report.

While most of us could see this episode as an unfortunate blemish Riley had inflicted on his employer, Blake Robinson (a great reporter himself) pointed out in the comments of SAI’s post that there’s a much broader issue in play here… which is the importance of journalistic standards, especially that of using reliable sources and having a standard for truth.

I’ve had the pleasure of being around bother Silicon Alley Insider and PaidContent reporters as they’ve tried to break stories, and both times they were waiting on “one more source” — something you’d expect to hear from a journalist, not a blogger.

But indeed this seems to be the future of journalism: journalism on the web — with fact-checking, standards, editors, etc; not what we’re seeing out of Duncan and so many others, which is just blogging, and consistently produces material even Jason Blair would feel uncomfortable about.

More on this at a later date.