There have been some good recaps of the conference by Andrew Chin, ReadWriteWeb, and MyBlogLog. So I won’t do another. Instead, I thought I’d share some of my notes from the conference. These are not intended to be complete, and may not accurately represent what the speakers/panelists intended. They are some of my interpretations, predictions and are based purely on my visual, aural and note-taking capabilities.

• Social networks/cloud:
  • General consensus is that the social networks of today have got to stop behaving like ‘walled gardens’; more cross pollination and data sharing
  • Some sort of social graph + personal identity federation breakthrough is sorely needed
  • There’s a need for implicit relationships (often inferred from real life relationships) eg: Neighbors are friends but often neighbors aren’t your friends on Facebook
  • Prediction: The major players (Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, AOL) will be the ones that breakthrough these problems
  • Business model for social apps is largely unclear; they are unable to monetize beyond ad impressions/click thrus
  • Prediction: Each person/user will have their own “personal CPM”
  • Social networks will have to compete to have the best experience for the high-influence individuals
  • Prediction: By 2013, social networks will become ubiquitous and taken for granted, they will be embedded everywhere; Question is how do we get there? What is the catalyst for wide adoption?
• Lifesteaming/Event streams:
  • Lifestreaming allows for checking updates across networks in one central location, is suggested to be a more ‘valuable’ feed as it is ‘filtered’ by the social graph
  • Need: Permissions are an unsolved problem (public vs. private events, shared among friends vs. everyone); need more fine-grained control without any surprises
  • Prediction: Filtering/value addition is the next big thing
• Facebook apps:
  • ~650 new apps a month (unconfirmed statistic)
  • app usage has flattened and may be trending down
  • most verticals are saturated
  • top 1% of the apps are used by 78% of facebook users (unconfirmed statistic)
  • tendency towards winner-take-all; either apps make it or not
• Myspace app platform:
  • publicly launching 3rd-party apps built on the OpenSocial developer platform by end of March
  • hyper-targeting is based on user profiling, machine learning and has shown up to 300% increase in click-thru rates
  • self-serve advertising system is intended for the long-tail of the advertisers
  • monetization models will only make sense once the problem of engagement is solved
  • engagement of the users in a social context will depend on the value the app/network provides
• Open Questions:
  • Is OpenSocial really open or is it directed/largely influenced by Google?
  • How can people reliably and easily port their data across networks? (Someone stated that Microsoft named it correctly as the Passport but implemented it completely wrong)
  • Is advertising the only monetization model for social apps/networks?
  • Is OpenID the solution to personal ID federation?
  • Is OAuth the solution to authentication?
  • Are social networks only limited to casual networks? Can they be extended to tradition enterprise software (Oracle, Salesforce, etc.)?
  • System-centric networks or citizen-centric networks? Hubs are social networks themselves or are the users the hubs?

Any thoughts on the open questions?