After a bit of reflection, these are my top 10 takeaways from the event.

1. Hollywood and Video Game Players were MIA. I went through the attendee list and could not find anyone in attendance from traditional media or big gaming companies like Disney/ABC, NBC Universal, CBS, Activision, EA etc. The only person from a traditional media company was a developer from Condenast. Given the amount of time people are spending on these social networks and the growth of social gaming, the social networks are perhaps some of the biggest competitive threats and opportunities for traditional media. I was shocked by the chasm between the techies and the media.
2. The social application space has gotten big fast and will get a lot bigger. Over the past 8 months, the Facebook application space has exploded and real companies have emerged to take advantage of the space. This is only going to get bigger as OpenSocial opens up more networks and data portability finally starts being a reality.
3. Social objects are at the center of healthy micro-communities. I had not thought about this before, but social networks are not just about looking at each other, talking to each other and helping each other. Social objects like books, movies, cars, etc. are powerful mechanisms for building networks that link together people who don’t know each other.
4. OpenSocial apps will grow rapidly in next six months. For the past few months, OpenSocial has been in a development mode. In the coming weeks, it will be released at MySpace an other places opening up huge new markets.
5. MySpace will get Facebook like functionality. I got this from listening to what seemed to be a subtle conversation about the differences in the platforms and concerns by the Facebook app developers that MySpace had been self expression oriented and that Facebook had been communication oriented. Whether true or not, it seems that the effect of the open APIs will be to make all of the social networks more alike through the integration of third party applications that plug functionality gaps. No one talked about this explicitly, but when I brought it up with some of the leading developers I would get knowing smiles, but no comments.
6. There’s money to be made, and advertising is only part of it. Virtual goods and virtual currencies are a very important part of the social business model. Advertising will play a big role, but it’s not the only way to monetize the communities that are being built by these applications.
7. Social shopping is coming soon. Facebook will add credit card functionality and with it will come social shopping. Look for this to emerge later this year.
8. Social networks are a powerful new force for fund raising. Beth Kanter showed that she could use social networking and social media to raise $200,000. The Obama campaign seems to be using it to raise huge amounts of money. Every organization that needs to raise money should be paying attention.
9. We need better data. The data we get now is ok, but we need more if we are going to be able to learn and drive innovation systematically. We need data beyond page views. We need data that reflects on not just users, but also social objects.
10. Social application development is a learnable skill. Stanford is teaching it and I’m sure other schools will too. Stanford was able to teach students to develop 50 applications and learned a lot by sharing experiences. This means that others can do this too. This is good news for traditional media as their content can be at the center of the social object, and a good social object is the basis for the good application. It’s also good news for organizations that need to raise money or that want to use social networking to build their relationships with other stakeholders.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, takeaways[/tags]

Both Jia and Tyler flew through their presentations so I had a hard time keeping up. I have enclosed Jia’s slides below.

Jia focused on a three phase approach to application development that map to the lifecycle of the application. It starts with marketing and validation. You need to decide the target audience, the messaging you will use and the channels to reach them.

Understanding what audience you are targeting helps to define which social networks will work best based upon their demographics. Once you have defined the audience you need to determine what application verticals and what channels will be important. On Facebook, these channels include news feeds, notifications, email profile, news, email profile, invites, profile action nonuser pages, and profile pages.

On Facebook, these channels include news feeds, notifications, email profile, news, email profile, invites, profile action nonuser pages, and profile pages.

The next phase is the growth phase. Here you need to break the viral barrier and drive up the viral multiplier. You are seeking to get it up above 1 user causing at least 1 other user to install. From there, you need to tune growth. You can track every thing and look for the trends.

Next part of the process is engagement. You need to tune the application to improve engagement and drive monetization. In this phase, email, profile and non-user pages become more important channels. It’s important to balance virality versus engagement to maximize growth and retention.

OpenSocial giving ability to add functionality. Still open questions about will it help with distribution and monetization still an open issue.

The audience is different than Facebook’s audience with a different use case. MySpace has been more about self-expression. We need to find out what will be successful with OpenSocial.

Open social channels include news feed, profile main page, bulletins, messaging, invites, non user pages.

Tyler pointed out that we need to understand the platform – the functionality, the data models and relationships provided are different. This should drive differences in what gets developed.

Part of this discussion also hinted at the differences between MySpace and Facebook as it relates to activity feeds in Facebook that may cause more viral spread of applications.

SLIDES

| View | Upload your own

[tags]gspwest08, Graphing Social, social application development[/tags]

Why the space valuable? Size and growth of audiences is driving value. The opening of the API’s at MySpace and OpenSocial is driving huge opportunities.

Application developers ask VCs why should they take the money when they are making good money with their applications. The answer according to the panel is that they can help build the company into something with substantial scale.(my note: this is a standard VC pitch, so make them prove they’ve done it if you are taking their money for this reason. A much better reason is their connections and how they can help you raise more money in later rounds.)

Each sector may provide one or two leading applications, but can any individual segment get to scale. Maybe there is a play in consolidating leading applications across sectors.

What are the big opportunities for a small Facebook developer? Build something good, get good reviews and use that to drive adoption. Growth may be slower, but users wills be more valuable.

Focus on building your business. Build a model that pays for your servers, then your salaries, then makes a profit. If you need inspiration, go to Borders. Look at the magazine racks and find a niche that you can serve.

As for valuations, make its a discussion.  In the end, make sure you feel good about taking the investment.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, Facebook application funding[/tags]

Global advertising spend on the internet continues to grow rapidly. There are a whole variety of ways to monetize via advertising and transactions.

Application monetization networks like SocialMedia and VideoEgg have emerged to aggregate applications into advertising networks. To turn this into a big business, we need to get the brands to start spending more seriously to reach these audiences.

Marketers need to think about very new things when marketing in applications and games, such as where/when their ad gets shown within the application flow. Once the user is more engaged there is more likelyhood of getting the user to do things with advertising.

Murtaza observed that CPM can pay some bills, but real action is in virtual currency used that can be bartered for services and goods, both physical and virtual. Troy says that people can drive high media value they can make the money needed to drive revenues.

Seth observed that the best that Google has been able to do for Adsense is an effective CPM of $0.50, and that we need to do better than that to be successful.

What’s the new measure – revenue per active user according to Murtaza.  The ad network guys on the panel still focus on effective CPM.

(My note: This panel was very skewed to advertising.  There was very limited discussion of monetizing options beyond advertising.  Virtual transactions, lead gen all have much more potetial as CPM is not going to go up in my opinion.  Large publishers such as Yahoo have huge amounts of unsold inventory and it’s not going to get better as the world of content continues to expand faster than the amount of user’s discretionary time.  My bet is with Murtaza.)

[tags]gspwest2008, graphing social, application monetization[/tags]

Andrew started the conversation by describing viral marketing as a marketing system where your customers sell your next generation of customers. Jia pointed out that the time frame now has been collapsed by the social networks so there is an accelerated viral opportunity.

There’s been a long evolution of viral from word of mouth, through email and other tools that have been turned into features of the social networks. Now instead of starting with the product, you can start from the customer and work back through the social networks as distribution channels.

Jai pointed out that early on Facebook did not put much restraint on how many invitations could be sent which created a gold rush effect that allowed an eco-system to grow as developers chased the growth. Now Facebook has put constraints on viral marketing tools which will make it much harder for new players to grow. The newer APIs are also being more conservative and that means they may have more difficulty building the same kind of ecosystem.

The differences in functionality across sites drives difference in application strategy. For example, on MySpace the focus will be more on applications that are self-expression, canvas oriented and less the viral, messaging applications.

Andrew highlighted that you can learn a lot from games in helping to make applications more successful. Things like reward schedules can drive use.

If you can build something that catches on you will know after the first couple of thousand users. If it’s successful with this group you can be confident that you can grow the applications penetration. Less viral applications will take marketing money to grow.

Being viral is not all it takes. If you’re getting lots of visitors and trials, and are not converting them into active users you are missing the opportunity. You need to make sure you’re measuring retention and repeat use of different visitor cohorts to ensure long term success.

It takes both viral growth and engagement to be successful.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, viral applications, viral marketing[/tags]

Application count is up from 500 new applications per week to over 600 new applications per week, climbing up to over what appears to be 17,000 applications. The top 5-10 applications have really been the most successful in terms of usage, with a steep curve downwards for many other apps. 1% of apps account for 77% of volume, 2% account for 86% of volume, 10% account for 98% of volume and 20% account for 99% of volume.

Update: Found a Facebook Analytics site with some good date here.

[tags]gspwest08, Graphing Social, Facebook statistics[/tags]

The panel talked about what they are doing and how they are making money. It all starts with how social games are different?

The opportunity is to create the very personal social gaming experience that we see when families play the Wii. Creating games like this online is the goal of social games. It’s about bringing people together, whether they be strangers or friends or family. The psychology of the games becomes more important in social games. The perspective is on an easy way for people to hang out together, not on game technology.

Experiencing the internet together is more fun than doing it on your own. A good rule of thumb is, if it can’t be made better using Facebook don’t do it. Users enjoy the light weight nature of these apps. Social gaming takes share from casual gaming.

Scarbulous is the breakout game. It’s so simple that it allows you to interact with lots of people in a light weight asynchronous interaction. Long playing synchronous games are played in a single session that doesn’t create a reason to come back. Asynchronous games give you a reason to come back. This can cause powerful viral effects.

Branded games are the key to monetization right now. It’s highly efficient way to get major brands and media companies reach their audiences. Average deals right now are about $100,000 for Buddy Media and they are sold out of inventory right now, so they are working on monetizing other company’s games. Another great opportunity for monetization is virtual goods. The amazing thing is that all the companies on the panel were profitable and they think there is still more upside if they can close brand deals.

Are social games a hit driven business? Games are hit driven. The big ones get bigger and the rest fall off. The is definitely a cycle of growth, use and then fatigue. The end level though may be higher than what is seen elsewhere on the web. A number on the panel are working on how to create networks to help leverage existing installed base of applications, either through click networks, APIs, partnerships, platforms that can be rebranded or acquisitions.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, social games[/tags]

MySpace has had a history of a strong ecosystem

• Youtube , Photobucket, Slide, RockYou are all examples

MySpace values are driving there developer platform.

• Minimal creative restrictions
• Encouraging self expression
• High level of customizability
• Beneficial to user, developers

MySpace API overview

OpenSocial APIs

• javascript/html for embedded apps
• with myspace extensions

REST APIs

• server to server comm
• Oath authentication

Actionscript APIs

• flash support

Why OpenSocial?

Openness

• openness key to Myspace success
• openess helps everyone

Portability

• developers can spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding for every social network

Leveraged existing technologies

• no need to lerrn proprietary development languages

OpenSocial Support

• full support of public spec
• currently support V0.6 with support for V0.7 soon
• MySpace specific extensions for MySpace specific features
  • bulletins
  • additional attributes for bands

Platform surface

• Profile surface
• Canvas surface
• User homepage surface (private space)
  • User specific surface
  • Enables the application to show specific data to a user
  • eg ebay bids, tweets from friends
• Application Gallery
• Application Profile

Security, Privacy and Safety
Applications will go through safety review process makes sure it doen’t spread bad or rogue code or viruses, keeps data secure and protects against rogue actions from other users

Apps will be governed by same privacy controls that are in place for members
will be using new technology to ensure that applications are safe for end ocnsumers

• Caja – MySpace and Google Joint Javascript Sanitizer
• Proprietary MySpace Technology

Balancing Virality and user Experience

Virality vs User Experience

• take long term approach to growth and distribution
• ensure clean applicaiton experience

Spam based growth is not needed for good applications

Measured approach to application growth

• Workflow limited to sending message 1 to 1

Restrictive early on, slowly increase communications channel

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, MySpace[/tags]

What does Social mean? We look at each other, talking, laughing, we help each other, we read together, we do projects together. We also have social objects that we tell stories about.

The challenge is how do we socialize objects online without having to create yet another social network?

OpenSocial designed to do this. OpenSocial is one API that works with many websites. Just now getting through gartner technology hype cycle over the last 3 months. OpenSocial is now on version 0.7

Core OpenSocial services include people, activities and persistence. After a tour through some of the code used to make the API work, Kevin Marks described two open source projects designed to help build appliations – Caja is project designed to help prevent things from going bad. Caja is an optional Javascript sanitizer for use by developers. The panel recommended using Caja or at least tesing using Caja.

The second project is Shindig. Shindig is a reference implementation of the OpenSocial and Gadgets stack that is designed to accelerate development and deployment. The panel said that now is the time to start developing.

Update: Here is the slide show:

| View | Upload your own

And a post by panel member.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, opensocial[/tags]

Fast, easy, open, and everywhere are key reasons why cloud computing wins. The cloud is about getting the computer out of the way so that we can be more productive.

How does this matter in the social cloud? Getting the computer out of the way so that we can interact more easily and be more productive. People are the killer application of the web. This is not new. Getting me to the information I want has a long history. email, newspapers, bookstores, ftp, gopher, bbs all were the beginning of this. Social used to be spelled c-o-l-l-a-b-o-r-a-t-i-o-n.

Need to get the accidental barriers out of the way.

When Google thought about social they started by asking where would it be better to do things with friends. ie add “do it with friends” to end of sentence such as – You will plan a trip with your friends.

Hard problems still out there. These are accidentalt barriers.

Fragmented authentication is a problem. Different logins across sites cause people problems. OpenID is a good start, but has a ways to go.

Fragmented social connections. Too many places to set up friend.

Fragmented applications across sites – not the same everywhere my friends are.

Goal is tomake the social web better. The end result any app, any site, andy friends without having to think about it.

First step is to share the pain.

OpenSocial’s goal is to allow you to

• Invent it
  • xxx with your friends
• build it
  • standard web app (html/javascript)
  • new JS APIs(who I am, who I know, what I do)
• Run it
  • on any social site that runs api

There were a number of surprises from launching OpenSocial:

1. Breadth of interest. Classic social networks wanted to use it, the business oriented sites wanted to use it, enterprise software wanted to use it, communities wanted to use it. Lots of different types of uses, all with the same basic use case.
2. Open source is a good idea. Shindig in Apache incubator was set up, thanks to Brian McCallister at Ning. Clear mission, open license, engaged community and real world use.
3. Execution is hard. The idea is ahead of the execution. This is what’s next.
4. Questions about can you also help with… connections across networks that extend the solution to other aspects of connecting people, apps and sites.

What’s next?

1. Get the spec and build apps
2. Contribute to Shindig
3. Join the group and grow the spec

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, OpenSocial[/tags]

The work hackers do is not done not for the money, but for the technology that matters. Tim goes through history describing how inventors throughout time have been hackers, including Archimedes. Tim speaks of the passion that drives hackers. They believe in themselves and what’s possible.

These are the areas that are interesting to Tim. These are the things that are small tomorrow, but may be big tomorrow.

• Developing world’s use of technology
• Space
• Open Source
• Sensors and Ambient Computing – moving beyond keyboards to sensors doing the data collection
• Reality Mining
• Connecting you life to the web
• Phones as controllers
• New interfaces
• Information visualization
• Body Hacking and wearable computing
• Personal robotics
• Open source vision and machine learning
• Brain hacks/imaging
• Personalized geonomics – 23 and me as social
• Synthetic biology – building new organisms
• Collective intelligence such as digital democracy, coding against corruption, prediction markets, ensemble learning
• Green

Tim ends with a poem called The Man Watching

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Via http://www.cdra.org.za/

Don’t choose the easy path. Find a hard problem and try to solve it!

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, Why I Love Hackers, Tim O’Reilly[/tags]

Group One – Facebook Apps

• Who Has The Biggest Brain? Facebook App, 600k downloads, 4 minutes per session – 2 million minutes 22%
• Just Three Words 7 minutes on site with lots 2 hours per day three weeks to write two weeks to rewrite 3 million words, 60k stories, average size 200 words, created for public – 2%
• Puzzle Messages – simple hybrid between puzzle and messenger have total of 27 apps and 12 million users – 1%
• Ski and Snowboarding – 1200 resorts in the world – Where have you been? Show off where you have been, share photos etc. Users have geocoded where the resorts are, correcting a lot of what had been poor data about location. -9%
• Dipity – Wikipedia for timelines in Facebook – takes all the data and connects other people and publishes the results in a timeline. Allows you to add other RSS feeds to timeline. -22%
• Developer Analytics – Analytics for Facebook Apps. There’s an analytic tab that’s hidden right now. Virality(install as a result of some one else installing), Engagement(return uses), Revenue. Rolling out to private beta in next few weeks. -40%

Group 2

• Know your neighbor – Written for Orkut – Twitter for your community and neighbors on steroids. Sorts neighbors by distance from you and lets you send messages to your neighbors – 6%
• Reading Social – built on OpenSocial sharing about books across platforms. Also showed dining social, drinking social, music social – 41%
• Going Places – connecting people and places – social travel application. “Smart Travel Layer” connects to Facebook, MySpace, Orkut. Take test – match with friends on compatibility basis. Add places you’ve been. 400,000 places in database. You can see who has been to places you want to go and see how they rated that place. – 8%
• ChirpScreen – photo sharing app using a screen saver. Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts all feed the app. Has comments back to photo owner. – 43%

Note: final votes will be updated tomorrow.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, GSP AppNite[/tags]

DiSo is a project founded by Steve Ivy and Chris Messina, built on top of WordPress. The project aims to explore the design of a distributed social network using many of the building blocks the blog software already supports, while leveraging technologies like XMPP and XFN for friendslist federation and message delivery.

Social networking is not all about the add. It’s not about stupid apps. It started out with niches, MySpace – bands, Facebook – college students, LinkedIn – professionals. They were all system centric views of social networks. This causes the view of system centric value, not people centric value. The internet is much bigger than any sytem out there. We should not consider users to be customers.

We need to move from system centric view to a citizen centric view of the world. Who are web citizens? They have identities, they have provenance, they have friends, they have agency.

What are the aspects of a distributed social network. It has a home for your data. It has the ability to manage the data. Systems should subscribe to me. I should not have to subscribe to them. There needs to be flexible permission systems.

Benefits from a distributed model. Cross pollination of value from different systems. A more up to date profile that makes it more valuable to other systems. Permission for everyone to build based upon the profile. Easier upgrade path.

Components of a DiSo site. Activity feeds are proliferating. Ability to publish friends list and ability to move it around. Messaging and notifications are critical components. Filters to handle flood of messages. Standardization of terms and permissions. Groups, grouping and events that put the user in charge. Identity consolidation and rel-me.

Technologies that are available: OPenID, Microformats, OAuth, XRDS-Simple,ATOM/APP, Jabber/XMPP

Current status: Starting with WordPress because it’s PHP and there was an existing OpenID plugin they could use. You can find out more at Diso-project.org

Update: Here are the slides

| View | Upload your own

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, DiSo, Chris Messina[/tags]

Dan Farber (CNET Networks), Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), David Lavenda (WorkLight), Allen Hurff (MySpace), Ben Metcalfe (Swordfish Corp / DataPortability.org) discuss managing privacy and data portability for social networks.

Where are we on data portability?
We are still in a walled garden environment. I may be a Digg user, but finding all the other people I know is a pain. People keep scraping your contact list to find other people. We need to get both the technical and the human side of this to work.

Discussions about online reputation, who owns comments etc need to be taken into consideration with respect to how you support data portability and still manage privacy.

What do we need to do to bring intranet data to social sites?
On the data side is the primary issue is how to manage security and access to data. On the work flow side, control over data and data security is a big issue. Secure Enterprise 2.0 initiative is just now getting up and running to focus on the issue.

Where are we on the Data Portability Initiative?
Companies recognize it is a big problem. It has taken time to pull the group and organization together. A number of start-ups will announce when they release products. Across the board there is support, but it is taking time. Are companies still protecting there data or will those that go open gain an advantage? Still an open question, but these large companies want to be involved to help shape how this concept will scale.

How do we get consumers to grok this?
Build real use cases that the consumers understand. When you show them in a way that makes sense to them. Who gets to see your photos etc? Once consumers see it working the right way somewhere they will point to it as an example of what they like.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, data portability, privacy[/tags]

Jeremiah walked through the challenges facing developers as it relates to monetizing apps and walked the panel through how they view these challenges.

One word description of the business models of the panelists:

Forrestor – library, Clearspring – connector, newsGator -Kitchen, Widgetbox – Color Me Mine, Gigya – Spine for Social Media

Measurements and ROI
Not well developed today. How do we measure in a distributed world? Technically we can collect the data, but real communication gap in connecting web data and ROI. Do we get sales bump? Can we measure that like we can with coupons? Need to start with monetization strategy to decide how to measure so that we can structure data collection and measurement correctly.

Brand protection
How can we make sure Pepsi ad does not put next to Coke ad? You can’t. Consumers own the brands and they decide what’s relevant. Give consumers tools to market and evangelize on your behalf.

Distribution
How do we get widget distribution? Well known brands will get picked up, but problem for the remaining 99.9%. One option is to put the widget into ad units, but that might not have contextual relevancy. Getting close to the community may be the best option.

Monetization
How to make money? Everything that’s new, is not so new. There’s the social apps that are view/impression based. Starts with CPI (cost per install) basis. From a publisher prospective, extension of your content. This gets into revenue sharing deals that need to be worked out. The challenge is to get both parties to agree on the split. For advertisers, they want distribution they can pay.

We will learn a lot from the entrepreneurs out there about how to monetize.

Widget Strategy
How do we build a widget strategy? Need to understand full scope of process. need to define end to end success: conceptualization up front, distribution, measuring success on the back end. Start with objectives, for example, awareness=distribution, insight=installations. Take the top one or two things they come to you for and let them take it away with them. If its search, let them take your search with them. Really identify with your audience. Respect them. If it’s not popular on your site, it won’t be popular as a widget. Think of a widget as an extension of your website. Link it to your web monetization strategy.

Mistakes
What are the biggest misconceptions? Assuming it will be viral. eBay created a Facebook widget that doesn’t get used as compared to a third party widget that gets used on websites. The eBay widget doesn’t get used because Facebook is not about shopping, but the website widget gets used because it can be used to drive traffic to auctions.

Confusing information like a news feed with being social. To be social, it needs to be interactive, engaging and make my day. Really social apps that deliver value get lots of clicks.

Questions:
Can revenue be derived from utility as opposed to advertising? Look at Widgetbox – they make money. Lead gen applications like credit apps can be very profitable.

How do you work with a client to budget for widgets and media distribution? Costs can be anywhere from $5,000 to $150,000 for development. For distribution, look at online marketing campaign for examples.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, widgets[/tags]

Oren Michels (Mashery), Seth Sternberg (meebo), Jessica Alter (Bebo), Jeff Roberto (Friendster), Chris Damsen (Netvibes) discussed some of the different social networking platforms.

To add to the competition, Chris, from Netvibes, announced that Netvibes was releasing its platform. Code name Ginger.

We have a lot of competing platforms beyond Facebook and OpenSocial. If you look globally, different platforms have very different penetrations of different geographies. It presents challenges for application developers who must publish on different platforms and opportunities for other developers to make their versions of popular apps for other platforms.

It’s still really early as we are only 8 months into this platform API proliferation, so there is still time to get involved and innovate.

Every platform wants to embrace every application, but also wants to differentiate their APIs to expose unique features of their networks. This makes it tough for developers to really scale across different platforms. Seth, from meebo, talked about how the IM networks have competing standards and how it would be “way” better to have a write once standard for developers and users. The issue is who sets the standard and what risks does this pose for the others.

Jessica, from Bebo, points out that each of these companies would like to have healthy and well developed ecosystem, and that they have different functionality so one standard may not fit across all the networks. Bebo which has embraced the Facebook standard as part of it’s API, and it takes a few hours to port a Facebook app to Bebo. To port to Friendster, it could take hours to days.

Question: Most surprising group to join network:

Meebo – Librarians
Bebo – US community very engaged and younger
Friendster – expats moving around the world
Netvibes – well distributed user base

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, platform wars[/tags]

What’s social about feeds? Feeds help you keep track of what you friends/family are doing and can also be used a social filter for new content discovery.

The panel discussed what’s public and what should be private. A concern was raised about how the norm with a feed is sharing, unlike email where there is somewhat of an understanding that it is not something that should be public. In reaction, it was important that there should not be surprises. The user should have control over what information gets shared and with whom. Facebook doesn’t allow user activity to be shared via a feed and the panel felt it should be open.(applause)

The very public is easy, the very private is easy. It’s the middle ground that’s hard. The balance is where the focus needs to be.

The other factor is to be a good partner with the content providers. For aggregators of feeds, sending traffic back to the site that generated the content is really important. The challenge is to drive enough value back to the source to make sharing worthwhile for everyone.

When focused discussions happen within a friend based network the discussion can be much higher quality than a wide open public conversation like those on YouTube. It was observed that as more and more content flows onto the social networks and into feeds, we will see an increase in the need and value of filtering.

Clearly feeds are valuable, but there are some real business model issues to be resolved as more and more mashups integrate content from across the web.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, feeds, lifecasting[/tags]

• Blog Juice – pulls in recent Tweets from visitors
• Raven social Network members – pulls in data from MyBlogLog – also available as a wordpress plugin
• Everwas – popular tags
• Meetspace – people around you from m.mybloglog.com

UPDATE: Video

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, mybloglog api[/tags]

She has raised over $200,000 to help Cambodian children. She won the America’s Giving Campaign which was based on number of donors and focused on how new web tools can drive the result. She has learned what works and what annoys donors.

Her example is to jump right into asking her network what the strategy should be using her blog.

Strategies for success:

• Make it personal – “It’s about why the messenger cares” She describes why she cares about Cambodian children
• Stories with Faces – This helps drive people up the ladder of engagement to scale. Story example: Why is this Cambodian Orphan wearing a creative commons t-shirt?
• Network Weaving – Use the three R’s relationships, rewards, reciprocity
• Fun, Humor, Easy, Urgency, Competitive Spirit, Passion. Beth describes how she used Facebook to tell people what she wants for her birthday 51st Birthday Challenge donations, use Youtube with Kids video, Twitter challenge, Facebook challenge that she had tagged as evanglists, Twitter rallies
• Make it competitive
• Say Thank You in creative ways
• Include Paypal as payment mechanism

UPDATE: Slides from presentation

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[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, social causes, Beth Kanter[/tags]

Rodney views it s frictionless WOMA, facilitates customer acquisition and drive low cost customer acquisition with specific demographic targeted marketing.

He describes how Facebook can be used for Lead Generation, brand extension, exposure and loyalty.

Suggests that marketers start experimenting.

8 ways to market on Facebook: Apps, groups, paid groups, tarted ads, newsfeed ad buys pages, beacon, and guerilla.

Scrabolous is the new golf – a new way to micro-touch and communicate. Where I’ve Been – good example of how a brand can sponsor an app and is aligned with Orbitz. Firefox group is an example of sponsored group. Facebook Ads is a self service ad solution that allows you to target demographics networks Social Ads with personal relevancy. CTR is low(my experience with CTR is 0.02%). Pages are another way to market. What’s the difference between groups and pages. News feed $100k to buy the banner. 1 ad per page. Third party ad networks like Cubics and Zynga (game network) have emerged to advertise on applications.

Rodney describes steps to success that include a clarity about end goals and a willingness to experiment.

Questions:

What about forced invite numbers? Tested forced invites with greeting card application – forced invites worked, but now growth remains.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, facebook marketing[/tags]

They start by running through the background to the class and the founders of the class. They call it the Stanford Facebook Class and describe how they were making it up as they went. They thought they were going to have each student make 3 apps each, which may have been over ambitious.

Thought they would get 20 students, and 120 showed up for the class. They ended up with 80 students. BJ, Dave McClure and the TA’s aught 2 classes per week.

Four or five applications were really successful, such as KissMe. They got lots of press coverage, some of which was good, some not so good.

Students independently set up a Sunday group meeting that is still going on. The final was an open expo with over 500 people attending to see demo’s of the applications. You can find the student presentations at bayCHI

$500,000-$1,000,000 revenue generated by class, three companies formed, 2 companies acquired, lots of job offers and a few drop outs.

Phase 2 – 2 month experience to try again eg Oregon Trail (sp?)

Takeaways:

• Never too late to build new app
• Simple apps won
• Speed and iteration matter
• Community cooperation leads to success – more sharing, more success
• Individual opinions are worthless, need the crowd to judge
• Copying success is cheap/fast way to succeed
• Metrics matter, but today’s tools are weak – had to build their own
• This is a learnable skill
• Success comes from chaos/control cycle
• Mass interpersonal persuasion is finaly here

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, Stanford Facebook Class[/tags]

The focus is on creating long term value. He says their strategy has three parts: frictionless platform, leverage social graph, and world class applications.

Frictionless Platform

What they want in terms of making the platform frictionless for users

• Helping users communicate
• Meaningful activity
• Valuable information
• User trust

He describes the changes on the site’s experience an enhanced wall, profiles profile boxs, profile action links that increase application uses.

He says they also want to make it frictionless for developers. Shared reusable technology, core infrastructure, and viral distribution of applications are all parts of this strategy. They are licensing the technology to others like Bebo. They are also have a marketplace for developer resources that connect marketers to developers.

Ben discusses how they had users suggest translations and vote on results which resulted in a very scalable translation/localization process. He says that this can be used by developers to localize their applications.

Leveraging the social graph

Ben describes the power of Facebook as an asynchronous conversation with your friends. You update everyone efficiently about what’s going on. He describes the example of the Causes application and their Photo application, which is the largest photo application in the world.

For developers, we want social applications for Collaborative authoring and design, multi-player games, sharing experiences

World class applications

They see applications progressing to other industries and to productivity. Sports, health, religion are all attractive segments. He also describes how they will be providing commerce functionality with developer APIs, secure purchasing and new types of application monetization models.

Ben discusses how they want to increase user control. He describes the problem of having to invite 15 friends to get the results. They are now adding ability for users to complain. He says that they want to support applications that users support. He is looking for positive user value loops. He describes Bookshelf, Dogbook, and Quizer as positive examples.

Questions:

How do you see social driving ecommerce? A variety of experiences are inherently social and that will lead to new applications. Who’s going to do something, join them. (Sounds like MatchActivity.com)

What is timeframe for ecommerce? Later this year will take credit cards.

Who else has licensed the Facebook platform? Involved in a number of discussions – no announcements

Why limit number of invites? Want invites to be quality invites. Need to balance quantity with relevance.

[tags]gspwest08, Graphing Social, Facebook, Ben LIng[/tags]

Starts by focusing on how they think about the internet. Internet becoming more personal, more portable, and more collaborative.

Myspace core business is driven by two key engines and enablement platform( tools to create your own experience as a user and developer tools) and a connectivity platform (the MySpace social graph). MySpace wants to use these core engines to drive change in the internet.

Launched a developer platform on February 5. Phase 1 is developer only (30 day head start). Phase 2 will go live to users and launch an application directory. Phase 3 layer in an additional services for developers.

What it to be a democratic process to give developers a voice and level playing field.

The platform will be based on open standards, eg, Open Social.

Amit states that there is a commitment to keeping MySpace safe and a commitment to monetization.

Five surfaces for an application

• directory listing
• profile
• canvas pages
• embeds on profiles
• embeds on home pages

API to public profile data
authenticate user
access friends list
public information
photos
videos
status mood

Amit focuses on the business of social platforms
Its been hard to monetize because traditional approaches don’t work. He says they are “laser focused” on solving this problem.

• 300 people in sales class 1 branded sales, class 2 perfromance sales, class 3 network ads
• 150 engineers and product managers focused on monetization technology
• all inventory runs off of one ad server and we can yield optimize every single impression

The philosophy – sell people not pages. Need to go beyond keywords to learn about what images, blog posts and unstructured data to create hyper targeted interest groups.

He shows an example of Brad – the sports and music fan. He then goes on to do a comparison of hypertargeting vs traditional web proxies. He shows the range of data that MySpace knows about it’s users and examples of how detailed they can get with people’s interest data. Southern Girl example is a marathon runner with a count down to the next marathon – imagine what you can do with that information.

He says they are seeing 300% improvement in click through for 150 initial advertisers using hyper-targeting.

He says they have developed a self-serve advertising system for MySpace that will open up the advertising possibilities for small business marketers.

He sees this as just the beginning of scratching the surface. They will continue to focus on smart monetization technology to unlock value in social media.

Questions

How much does hyper-targeting pull in? – Pulls in a lot of un-structured data. Uses smart machine learning technology – points to 300% improvement as evidence.

How will developers make money? Help facilitate with marketing. They will be developing their own ad network to help monetize this.

Where do you see engagement going? A few things that are important to consider, what are the metrics of a advertising system, what works at scale for advertisers, tie ins to new applications people are developing. Things will become more customized in terms of user/advertiser engagement

When will third party apps go live? Very soon, over the next few weeks.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, Graphing Social Patterns, Amit Kapur, MySpace[/tags]

The event focuses on social networking with a heavy dose of MySpace and Facebook. I will do my best to pick up the high points of the show and report them throughout the day on my CinchCast, where I call in to Blog Talk Radio’s Cinch service and record a short audio about what’s going on.

[tags]Graphing Social, gspwest08, social networking[/tags]