OpenFaced panel: Opening Up the Social Graph – Tantek Celik (moderator), David Recordon SixApart, Chamath Palihapitiya Facebook, Joseph Smarr Plaxo, Ted Grubb Satisfaction Unlimited

Joseph Smarr Plaxo:
Online Identity Consolidator find the same person’s account across twitter, flickr,ma.gnolia.com, pownce and everywhere else on the web , all without compromising the privacy if the user.
opensocialweb.com – lists a bill of rights to build out an openweb.

David Recordon SixApart

Ted Grubb Satisfaction Unlimited allows import profiles from other services which support microformats.
Love the ability to create an address book, where is a friend should get a friends phone if I have his email.
Facebook does not allow data taken out of facebook using Facebook API to be stored for more than 24 hrs.

Chamath Palihapitiya Facebook:

• Facebook pioneered open technologies like Memcache.
• The service itself itself is conducive to people trusting facebook.
• There is one social graph of 6Bil users in the world, we have captured 45Mil of it.
• Here is one model of it, we acknowlege we need people to help us.
• Everyone including facebook is at the starting point, we need to measure progress over coming years.
• Its a delicate balance between being open on the web on one hand and trusted and private on the other side.
• Should be done methodically and systematically not reactively.
  
• Consumer choice leads in the end.
• We need to provide more and more control to App developers and will open slowly and cautiously.

Questions:
How about integrating Openid and symantic web?
How long will it take for developers to build to an open web across platforms instead of one facebook platform?
What is each panelist doing to share open social graph:

David: Implement Openid
Facebook : want as much information to flow across the graph and touch everyone in the world.( This is an ambitious and audacious goal, but does not seem to signal real open graph outside of facebook, or unless I missing the point here)

update- my followup thoughts: Facebook has done well in initiating an ecosystem of developers and VCs with the F8 platform.
Facebook is building a competitive advantage with this ecosystem and unless the ecosystem demands with clear competitive returns, it does not make business sense for them to open up.
From my own personal experience hanging around facebook developers and SF Bayarea facebook meetup I find facebook clearly aligned with developers and opening up slowly where it makes sense for the developers and facebook.
Chamath has articulated this eloquently and I believe facebook is here to stay and buildout its competitive lockin.

Bringing space travel closer (or one step before it – the rover) is exciting stuff for me, must be for Larry too!

Its interesting to note the high tech entrepreneurs role in commercializing space industry – Elon Musk with SpaceX and Paul Allen invested in SpaceShipOne of X Prize, Jeff Bezos with his Blue Origin, building a spaceship

This is part of the presentation on Social Media Optimization that I gave at BarCampBlock.

Social Media covers a set of technologies and online locations with common characteristics that affect brand perceptions:

1. Your customers talk among themselves, good or bad, affecting your brand perceptions.
- Happy customers should be encouraged to express their love for your brand and customer complains should be addresses openly.

2. Customers operate in trusted circles online and infleunce purchase decisions.
- Need presence and tracking of online communities and social networks.

3. Blogosphere has several influencers who have their own brands in areas of specialities.
- Update them with upcoming releases, court them as partners and help build your products.

Social Media Categories:

1. Digg, Reddit – Community Voted News Sites

2. Social Networks (Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, Hi5 etc)
- open sharing, peer influence is high, currently younger demographics is 60%

3. Second Life

4. Blogosphere
- Find blogs related to your brand and encourage articles and discussions
- Court influencers and partner to grow product and brand

5. Groups (Y groups, Google Groups)

6. Sites (review sites, supply chain, purchase sites)
- Monitor Comments and reviews.
- Honest scores high points to improve brands.

Joe Green’s Facebook App is Causes, raised $200K. Built on Ruby on rails, $100K on servers.
Joe Suk ‘s site is Mychurch.com, social network for churches, 6 apps , besthas 200K users. 3-4 days per App, 2 weeks for one with deeper integration to Facebook.
Adam Kalamchi 225,000 uses for his App launched Boozmail 2 weeks ago.

Booze-mail, Adam says he knows nothing about users, he is the coolest guy in the whole conference by his attitude in he panel!!! I will take the risk of sounding like a web2.0 geek will say I find Adam more promising, letting the market drive, because I can see how it is so aligned with Facebook users to just use Booze-mail to communicate with friends like poking your friend on Facebook.

Adam can scale it later adding any kind of features.

Alec Peters (audience) asked has anyone monetized their Facebook App? Cause is the only app thats making revenues.
Facebook makes it easy to scale Facebook Apps adoption without thinking of revenue models. Everyone is focused on growth, which according to Joe Green’s is the best strategy to grow Facebook as a palatform with smart developers building on it.

I can’t agree more, there will be a phase when the developers will develop a revenue strategy once they have a userbase.

moderated by Noah

Sitting at a panel session “Online Communities To a Million and Beyond”

Joe Greenstein of Flixter, Jim Squires of Ning, Ramu Yalamanchi of hi5, Jonathan Abrams of Socialilz (earlier founder of Friendster), moderated by Dave Feinleib of Mohr Davidow Ventures.

1. The repeat theme of the day has been to know your users – product-market match.

- Know your target user, whats the emotional element if why they use your product.
- Your product has to be really good, provide value to users. For viral play it needs to have a viral element as part of the product, not forced send-to-friend emails.
- Get your ideas to market, feel the response, users may use it differently, different type of users may adopt it. Listen and adopt.

This topic is dear to my heart because I have been hearing lot of talk about “getting users” or getting a “facebook strategy” etc, which turns me off. Real marketing is about building a relationship of trust with your user. So viral is a tool, so hearing thus know your user is heart warming go me.

2. Is Hiring and Virality Inversely Proportional – How to Hire Teams to Make Viral Happen

Jon of Socializr shares his experience saying its not by super resumes, because he had the experience of firing bad performers in a past startup Friendster, who got hired as VPs because of Friendster’s brand name.
His advice is to hire really hungry people and give them a chance.

3. Invite-Onlys is thats a good idea to create viral play.

Friendster had an open site, then closed it to fix bugs and opened it again. Ramu of Hi5 says they did a live beta where they fixed bugs and responded to market, they did not do an invite-only beta. Everyone agrees

4. Scaling Issues of viral user play

Jim squires of Ning says Spam was the number 1 issue and had to build controls to keep their site usable for real users.

5. Money needed to build a real good growing site

Jonathan says $500K is enough to build, test and figure out if its viable.
Ramu says he got $250K and ran for 2 years and says being frugal in early days teaches fiscal discipline which helps once you scale.
Joe of Flixter has build with raising $30K only.

Zombies seems a cool one, worth checking out.

Jia Shen co-founder of Rock You is speaking at Community Next’s viral marketing experience. Ro Choy (bizdev guy) is ready to talk to any startup interested in RockYou building widgets (ro at rockyou.com)

RockYou – Launching Viral Widgets
1. Know your User:
– Understanding your users is No.1. Founders are all guys, social networks are lots of females.
– Go Online and surf at where your target demographics interact online. Subscribed to all teen magazines like Cosmogirl.
– Do not think of the guy next to you as your user, thats the biggest mistake by many Silicon valley startups.
– Facebook is 50% guys and 50% females.
– Took us a year to get into the mindset of our target users.

2. Make a simple Use Case to replace something that exists.
– Quiz are huge on Myspace, find low hanging fruit.
3. Create Viral Channels
– Myspace – user bulletins, In page profile
– Facebook – Minifeed, Invite (only 10 a day now), 14 effective viral channels found by experience
Think of what the users are doing, make it easy to send to the right people with right messaging.

How do you market test?

We do lot of user studies. Find active users and get their feedback. We are grassroots and find users from our database. Do a Webex on how they are using it and see understand usability. We got 9Million users in the last Month and half.

Ben Pashman of Gigya has joined him, as Gigya has been RockYou’s partner that helped them scale. Perfecting technology for widget distribution. Started with consumer focus then focus to become the services for widgets as an intermediary. They have partnered with 200 companies, have more 300 partnerships waiting ti go live.

It takes 30 minutes for startups 30 minutes to embed your content into Wildfire to be live with their tool. Competition is Cursemind, Stickbox. Wildfire is platform agnostic, fash or javascript or anything you choose.

Slide, Rockyou, PictureTrail, Photobucket, BunnyHerelabs, Poqburn Brightcove, Musicplaylist.com – all the top content sides are their partners.

Their product is called wildfire which gives users an interface to use simple code which will embed embeds into multiple social networks, keeping users to just focus on sharing content. It is a piece of Javascript or Flash.

Ben Flashman’s viral experience is B2B so a different experience.

1. Keep it simple, super simple.

He defines An index created from the following, not built into all web analytics tools today:
- depth of visits and conversion rate
- Recency of visits and conversion
- Brand awareness (people search for your brand and come to your site directly. Find how strong is your brand/how indexed it is in different search engines)
- Social media engagement – If they digg your content, its a measure of their engagement with your site/product
- Blog subscription of your content
- Comments

http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com for white papers.
Today we all look at web analytics, but don’t measure that the user loved your content and forwarded to a friend, or digged it or blogged it. That should all be factored into tie to the same user’s engagement with your site.

Good point, we seem to be tracking user’s digging, blogging, commenting, email forward to a friend as viral play and not factoring into web analytics.

The definition of visitor engagement is unique for your business, egment users by repeat users vs new visitors and track visitor engagement separately.

Could not resist the temptation to write about DotSUB, allows users to build a wikipedia like content around a single video by translating in into all world languages, helping disabled people and access in all cultures.

Technically, its smart to store all translations in a SQL database and offer clean UI to speak to the world in the language personalized for the user. very cool!

Rajen Seth of WebApps from Google “Adding collaboration to a document suite is a killer App ” Seth. I agree,, I am a big Google Apps fan.

Om raises good questions about Privacy and Security and lack of commenting on Google Docs, he uses Zimbra for email. Rajen agrees that Google Apps targets small to mid-size companies and its a leap of faith to switch to Google Apps, leaving desktop apps totally.

Om: Google Apps, and all Webware Apps expect users to give up existing usability features of MS Word, etc. Also lack of trust on private data, how can they be sure they will protect my privacy. He summarized as perception problem today not about technology.

Hale nails it as the fundmental problem with adopting the Internet right from the start!

Its an awesome topic, but the audience is quiet and polite, maybe its a signal of the uncomfortable evaluation stage of Webwares in the world today!

Nice question about need for channels for Web2.0 Apps, compared to established Enterprise VARs for desktop Apps. Satish of Zimbra says they exist for Web2.0 Apps.

Ismail quotes Zoho, integrates hundreds of Apps, and Salesforce.com, Webex Connect as good candidates to check out!

My question: When are development platforms for Webapps coming? Oh Ismail asked the same of Google. Rafe agrees Web Apps has to interoperate with others on the Web.

Question from Audience: Integrating voice to WebApps – Zimbra has launched a SIPzimbet, CISCO and VOIP switch, good plan to integrate to best of class Voice Servers. Google App has Voice on SNMP (open), showcase of select set of partners who integrated VOIP.

When will you voice enable your mobile Apps? Address cost issue – Open Source has not helped with low cost. Satish disagrees. Cost shd be thought not in terms of software cost, add maintenance cost and it adds up.

My question: What is the next Web2.0 Killer App the panelist are working on?

Om – An App that retains email properly, rethink email combined with RSS, Jabber, manages communication flow properly, so it increases productivity, not increases time we use with the App.
Satish – can’t tell ,its all dynamically born., Google App
hale – Closed all all IM clients when he was working on an App.
Ismail – Aggregating diff feeds, translate it into task.

This is meant to help an entrepreneur building a web site with an application on the backend or outsourcing frontend to any web designer. The goal is to help articulate what you need and break it to manageable pieces so you can have a clear understanding of what to expect and how much it will cost in terms of time and money.

Thanks to my customer Dan Pouliot of Cabletron.com who challenged me to develop a process to spec out and communicate the user flow on a ecommerce site in 1998, to Perry Hewitt who excited me about caring so deeply for the customer with great usability for Harcourt.com and Paul English, we meticulously tabled product specs and screenshots and taught me focused execution as I built my first tech startup Coola.

A good web site design is what excites your users to do what you expect of them and builds loyalty to return to your site.

Here are steps to follow to execute on building a clean frontend for your Web 2.0 consumer site.

1. Always start with a CED (Customer Experience Definition), which forces you to clarify who is the user and what is your expectation of their usage of your site.

2. All sites have several different constituencies – customers, consumers, media, investors, job-seekers and influencers who judge the reliability, size and value of a company by their experience on a site.

3. List all users. Remember who is your target user when you launch your site, some type of users may come later, so plan for them but don’t worry too much about all type of users for your initial launch version.

4. For each user type, list all possible actions they would take on the site. For example, a consumer can register/signup, try a demo as a guest, just surf and read about what you offer, refer friends, or turn around and become a customer as is the case in most B2C sites, in which case they transact and make a purchase.

5. Look at all possible combinations of these actions. For example a user may register first then try a demo, and refer friends. Another user may try a demo and surf around and then register.

6. Now plan a use case for all possible paths of action sequences for each user.

7. For every action, (this is a discussion between the product manager and UI designer) design the User experience by making screenshots.

8. Translate this (discussion between product manager with Engg) to become html for structure, CSS for presentation and Javascript for user behavior.

9. Find what user actions call the backend database or backend application (or middleware in a large system) by means of dynamic or interactive pages to send or receive data and ensure those are communicated in the product requirement specs.

10. Plan the best way to render data to the users in a clean and friendly fashion. For example, kayak.com is my favorite example of a Web 2.0 site that shows data and engages the users while they find travel deals with cool UI.

11. Decide on the branding message – cool and hip or funny and lighthearted or more formal and plan on content placement and graphics accordingly.

12. I am a big believer that all sites should have relevant apps to engage and communicate with the users. Place them strategically around the site.

13. Like the 90s had a blue as the favorite color, web 2.0 sites have an orange, or light shades of colors with simplicity as the key in their design.

14. Break the design into number of html pages, javascripts, widgets, flash apps, and CSS neccessary and execute on your design with a cool UI designer. This should get you a list of what needs to be built and what are the dependencies and help understand how much time and money it will take.

Here are my delicious links to good Web Site Design and UI. I’ll add more here as I find them.