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I just discovered that the Andy Rubin who's working on Google's phone project, profiled in the New York Times by John Markoff, is the same Andy Rubin who ran the Spies in the Wire multiuser Citadel system back in the 1980s.

Citadel was a "bulletin board system" -- software that let users post public messages and engage in discussions. When I first went online in 1985, I fortunately stumbled across Citadel systems in Minneapolis, where I lived.

In a day when many bulletin boards were dominated by file pirates and combative teen-age boys, the discussion-focused Citadel systems attracted intelligent and mostly polite grownups including lawyers, business owners and local TV personalities. Users regularly got together for offline events. When I built a home in White Bear Lake, MN, nearly everyone at our housewarming party was a Citadel user sporting a nametag with his or her online "handle."

I wound up running a Citadel bulletin board with several hundred users, setting up international networking and writing a monthly Citadel newsletter.

The Citadel community process, which included open-source development of the software, shaped much of my thinking about the online medium. When I had an opportunity to build an online news system in 1994 at the Star Tribune, the community conversation component was at the top of my list of requirements.

One variant of Citadel is still around, an open-source groupware server maintained by Art Cancro. It's all grown up now, but somewhere under the hood there's still a terminal interface suitable for 300-baud dial-up access.

In some ways a milestone is just a rock. In other ways it signifies the end of one thing and the beginning of something new. A couple of milestones this week:

The end of "I can't afford a computer:" Wal-Mart and Everex are offering a reasonably capable desktop PC for a breakthrough regular price of $199, which is less than the price of one night in a New York hotel room. It's not one of those "we only have two at that price" deals; it's available online and at many retail stores starting tomorrow. Look for this to further screw up conventional tech retailers, as Wal-Mart's flat-screen TV maneuver did last year.

The Google desktop: The aforementioned Everex runs a special Google-centric desktop on a Linux kernel. It's probably not the same one that's been rumored for awhile, but it demonstrates that Netscape's 1997 "Webtop" vision was right, after all. Bad news for Microsoft, which is so last century.

The coming Google hegemony: The aforementioned search giant is now the fifth largest company in the United States in terms of market value, closing in on AT&T. Unlike the bogus valuations being attributed to Facebook, this one is real.

The network of social networks: Google, hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Ning, Salesforce and Oracle are announcing tomorrow a set of open interfaces for programming "social networking" tools that talk to one another. The walls around the garden just got a lot lower.

The new accord between Google and the wire services -- Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Press Association (UK) and Canadian Press -- has been met with a range of reaction from ho-hum to what-were-they-thinking.

My old boss Tim McGuire is in the latter camp: "The first question is how much money is at stake here? I’m guessing newspapers still provide a LOT more of APs revenues than do partners like Yahoo and Google. Which leads to the second question, where are the angry newspaper people with their fiery pitchforks and nooses? I’m more than a little surprised newspaper executives aren’t up in arms over this partnership."

It reminds me of something I heard McGuire say many years ago: "Tactically smart and strategically dumb." You could apply that label to a whole series of decisions made by the AP, and the newspaper-dominated AP board, over the years.

But I'm in the ho-hum camp, for a couple of reasons.

Reason #1 is that AP's goose has been in the oven for years. The association came into being in 1846 to fix a problem that no longer exists. Technology and the market have moved on.

Habits are changing. People who are interested in news have the whole world at their fingertips, and routinely consume news from multiple sources. People with less interest rely on word of mouth, which also has been amplified and accelerated by the Internet. As a result, the value of AP news to newspapers is dropping rapidly.

Only an aging minority still relies on print for global news. There is nothing AP can do to change that.

Reason #2 is that there is little or no impact on local media online revenues. Most local media websites get their revenues from local advertising, which is targeted and naturally sells at a premium relative to "junk inventory" network advertising. Random traffic referrals from Google News have no value in that model, so losing them is no big deal.

But beyond that, traffic to wire content on most local websites is not significant to begin with. Some local websites have already pulled the plug on wire news; many never had it in the first place.

Local news websites are under tremendous pressure to build audience. Having generic AP content isn't an effective way to do that, so they're turning to blogging, photo galleries, social networking tools and databases of local information.

At some point, wire copy is not merely of low value, it's of negative value. Local sites are drowing their users with too much stuff, too many links. As Jakob Nielsen has said, every added link subtracts from the prominence of every other link. A cleanup is in order.

I'm not celebrating any of this. It just is.

WSJ reports that Google's long-rumored mobile phone is on its way to becoming a reality.

Drawing from no actual evidence whatsoever, mixed with a big helping of baseless speculation, here's what I think we'll get:

• Cute seasonal logos in Fisher-Price primary colors.
• Be careful what you say, because it's all recorded. Forever.
• If you're near a Wifi connection, you use that instead of the telco's system.
• Be careful what you say, because it'll be used to target advertising your way. (Remember "My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay.")
• The ads will be relevant and you'll click on them. Since you'll probably be driving, eating and talking at the same time, carnage will ensue.
• "I'm feeling lucky" gets a whole new meaning.
• Be careful where you go, because the built-in GPS will be used to target ads at you, and ... your waypoints will be stored forever. We'll take a giant leap toward MOM.
• If you can connect via Google Talk and bypass the phone network end-to-end, you will. Just don't use it for emergencies.
• As Google works to build out its free Wifi business, the telcos will collapse. No one mourns their passing.
• You can't have one unless somebody sends you an invite.
• The camera will post directly into Picasa Web and YouTube. We'll take a giant leap toward David Brin's future where we all watch each other and spool the video directly to the net.
• Total integration with Google Earth.
• EPIC2014.

(Feel free to post your own baseless speculation!)

The anti-MSM reaction on the net to the Belgian court ruling against Google News has been predictably hysterical and boils down to a few completely mistaken points:

• Google is a search engine. Google has become a publisher, and Google's activities as a publisher are the ones that are at issue here. Google's search system was not the issue in the Belgian ruling.
• Newspaper publishers are stupid and don't understand basics of the Internet like robots.txt. Nonsense. Everybody knows about robots.txt and about its shortcomings. The so-called robot exclusion standard (theoretically) forbids spiders from visiting pages. It can't encode licensing terms for spidered content. This is why the World Association of Newspapers is proposing a richer alternative called Automated Content Access Protocol.
• Google is sending valuable traffic to publishers, and squaring off against Google is self-destructive. This is not relevant to the question of whether Google's repurposing practices amount to fair use or thievery. But it also isn't automatically true. Publishers benefit from some sorts of Google listings and not from others. Many publishers have a business model predicated entirely on service to a geographically focused community and derive little benefit (and often great expense) from Google-driven traffic. And, of course, publishers suffer when the new summary pages of Google News take away the audience that otherwise would have gone to the publishers' content on their own sites.
• Google is good and MSM is evil. If you think that, you probably haven't read any of Google's one-sided terms-of-service documents or examined Google's collaboration with censors. Google snatches content at will and republishes it, but has this to say about your reuse: "For example, you may not use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service." Maybe we should just cut-and-paste that into our TOS documents.

I can't read Flemish, so I don't know what the order published on the front of Google Belgium says, but I can read the English-language summary (PDF) published at ChillingEffects.org.

It contains these words:

"Considering that the expert Mr. GOLVERS, who had as particular assignment to describe how press articles are presented and the interactivity between the visitor and the web site of Google News, concludes that 'Google News must be considered to be an information portal and not a search engine'; ...

"... as soon as the article can no longer be seen on the site of the Belgian newspaper publisher, it is possible to obtain the contents via the 'Cached' hyperlink which then goes back to the contents of the article that Google has registered in the 'cached' memory of the gigantic data base which Google keeps within its enormous number of servers; ..."

I'm not eager to see lawsuits against search engines as a primary tool for resolving this issue, but it seems to me that the Belgian ruling is well grounded in the reality of today's Internet. There is a line between fair use and thievery, and it is not Google's to define through unilateral action.

(Disclosure: I run Google ads on my site. Once in a very long while they send me a check for $100, which my wife forgets to cash.)