One of the last sessions at Supernova 2008 was about “liquid conversations” – the discussions flow away from their original source to services like Friendfeed and Facebook. Dave McClure (500 Hats) moderated the panel of David Sifry (Technorati), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Matt Colebourne (CoComment), and Loic Le Meur (Seesmic). I’m not sure McClure knew in advance that this would be not easy as he thought it would be. Here’s what happened.
Each panelist introduced himself and the service he was representing. After some regular introductions by Sifry, Taylor, Colebourne, it was up to Le Meur. He decided to pitch Seesmic by showing a video about the… infamous g-spot. The video was compiled of video replies by Seesmic users from ten different countries and a sex expert – the hilarious type. Here’s the video.
The video was welcomed with several rounds of laughing, although I did noticed some people were a bit shocked. Yes, that’s what happens when the French arrive. Some prejudices are actually based on something.
Valleywag reporter Melissa Gira – “Reporter, Bad Girl, Sex Nerd For Hire” – asked a good question about the video – after answering a question about g-spots. She wondered why Seesmic invites an expert to the video, when the service is all about the conversations of their users. Loic didn’t really give an answer, so I will: It’s a great marketing tool to turn the comments into a show and spice it up with a typical weird sex expert.
Now over to the liquid conversations
Enough for the sex part now, as McClure raised an interesting question about online conversations. They’re flowing away from their original source to places like Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter. Friendfeed users aren’t commenting on a New York Times article on the site itself, but express their opinion in Friendfeed. They find like-minded friends there, instead of the railing crowd at the New York Times page. The same thing happens with discussions on blogs – to the discontent of some bloggers. (more…)
The Open Flow Track sessions at Supernova 2008 just beg for a flood of buzzwords. You can’t avoid them when you’re discussing topics like Social Graph’s, Network business models and Bottom-up distribution Openness. Words like “collaborative”, “engage”, “social networks”, and “OpenID” keep flying around in Room 4 of the Wharton West.
That didn’t go unnoticed by the moderator of the Bottom-up distribution Openness panel Jeremy Keith (Adactio), so he decided to give a funny twist with a customized Buzzword Bingo page.
Leah Culver (Pownce), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency), David Recordon (Six Apart), and Tantek Celik thought of it as very funny and happily played along – although Leah didn’t immediately realized that every attendee had a different card. After Keith reminded her in a witty way that having different cards is quite vital for playing the game, he explained that you can refresh the page as many times as you want. He has even built a buzzword generator.
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has just talked about a new project called Solaris Registration Map. It’s an early access Google Maps mash-up of Solaris 10 and Open Solaris instances that activated Sun Connection to receive automatic software updates. Schwartz told the Supernova attendees that the mash-up informed them where their customers hang out.
When zoomed out, the results aren’t that surprising. The areas with a high density of Sun sign-ups are Europe, the urban areas of the U.S. and Asia, and the East coast of Australia. But when you’re zooming in, you can tell exactly where the Sun users are. Here are the Sun fan boys from London for example:
So as you can tell by the title of this post, Schwartz has also revealed why they’ve acquired MySQL. When I interviewed MySQL CEO Marten Mickos right after the acquisition last January, he told me that “Sun didn’t have a database and we knew we could fit that role perfectly”. So that’s one reason. Schwartz added another one this afternoon: “Because MySQL adds 100,000 dots to the map a day”.
First speaker at the Supernova Conference was Clay Shirky – writer, consultant and adjunct professor at New York University. His field of interest is the influence of Internet technologies on our societies and economies. In his latest book “Here Comes Everybody” he wrote down all the things he’s sure about and saved this keynote for some uncertain thoughts. His main message: we should transform the STOP-focused collective action into START-focused collective action.
Flash mobs as a political tool
Shirky started with an example from Belarus. In 2006, some kids from this Eastern-Europe country organized a flash mob via Livejournal. They asked 10.000 people to come to the October Square in Minsk for some massive ice-cream eating action. Their president, old-fashioned dictator Alexander Lukashenko, isn’t really fond of civil action, so he has forbidden any group forming on the important square. During the flash mob, he sent a small army of secret police to arrest the kids with ice-creams. Despite these arrests, the flash mobbers had reached their goal. They wanted to show the world what life looks like in Belarus. “For them”, Shirky said, “Livejournal was a tool to make their political lives better.”
Why is there no online barn raising?
These kids from Belarus are not alone. Shirky showed that all over the world, people are using social network groups to protest against undesired actions. This emerging trend is interesting and it stimulates positive action, yet they’re only concerned with stopping things. Real world collaborative action is often all people starting, creating, or building things. Yet this kind of collaborative action doesn’t seem to work in the digital world. “Why is that”, Shirky asked, “Why isn’t there an online barn raising? (more…)
Sometimes it’s frustrating being an Internet entrepreneur in Europe. It has all kind of advantages – such as the localization, small and easily accessible communities, and more that I probably don’t have to tell you about. But there’s one thing missing, the magical vibe of San Francisco and the Valley – the “we’re changing the world” kind of thing. As the European industry is fragmented in a dozen cities or more, yet in the Valley everybody’s gathered in one creative focal point. So for us, Europeans, there’s a limited community experience going on.
Esther Dyson talking to Clay Shirky (photo by Geodog)
And now I’m in San Francisco at Supernova 2008, where “CEOs and bloggers, entrepreneurs and academics, practitioners and visionaries, policy experts and industry thought leaders share insights and build relationships.” See? That’s the “we’re changing the world”-mentality I was talking about. I’m surrounded by influentials and leaders like Esther Dyson, Hugh MacLeod, Clay Shirky, Bob Iannucci, Scott Beale and Jeff Clavier who are shaping and defining the future of our beloved industry.
I think we – meaning European web professionals – can learn a lot from conferences like these and I’m looking forward to the day we can welcome such a conference in Europe. For now, I’ll live blog the key notes I think are particularly interesting for you. Would you like me to cover a certain speaker? Go ahead and ask me in the comments or on my Twitter account.
Written on 18th June 2008
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Valleywag reporter Melissa Gira – “Reporter, Bad Girl, Sex Nerd For Hire” – asked a good question about the video – after answering a question about g-spots. She wondered why Seesmic invites an expert to the video, when the service is all about the conversations of their users. Loic didn’t really give an answer, so I will: It’s a great marketing tool to turn the comments into a show and spice it up with a typical weird sex expert.
bret taylor, cocomment, Dave Sifry, friendfeed, g-spot, Loic Le Meur, matt colebourne, melissa gira, seesmic, supernova2008, technorati, valleywag
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