First off.
No jokes, please, re: why I’m the Challah back girl in the house. Surprising number of non-tribes peeps here so I don’t feel exceptionally out of my own community. Even ran into an old friend of mine here.
Anyways:
Back to the sort of live-blogging of this event. But man do I suck at this. I’d be a lousy transcriptionist.
Clearly no Iphone or CES discussions here.
Who’s here:
Jason Hoffman – Joyent , CTO
Anil Dash – SixApart – VP Evangelism
Chad Dickerson – Yahoo Sr. Director, Yahoo! Developer Network
Evelyn Rodriguez, Author & Social Media Consultant – Blog here
Discussion opens with microblogging phenomena Twitter.
Anil asks the audience “How many people have heard of twitter” and gives background on Ev & Obvious.
Of course guess what I do?
Chad speaks to social behavior associated with discovery and relates an anecdote re: reacquainted himself with a colleague from Bangalore India who also digs Yo La Tengo. Also introduces Yahoo’s latest big news.
MyBlogLog acquisition by Yahoo re: what it is and why it makes sense for users in terms of how implicit activities allow for social behavior to trigger. Sorry, the story got bumped off techmeme. You cannot trump the Iphone, my friends.
Anil: Metatags, tools like del.icio.us to allow for items that you find in passing that wind up being useful overall in a wider community.
Evelyn: Relays a story re: how she used Yelp for a referral on an optomotrist. And how her doctor had no idea what yelp was.
Internal MJ Monologue: See. See? Get out of the clusterfuckery of web2.0 and see how the real world still works at the end of the day.
Anil: Mentions how we tend to still be edgecase focused. Must. Focus. On. Real Peeps. How regular people are still, maybe, scared of blogs and how people get fired from their jobs. Are poeple still technophobes at the end of the day?
Evelyn: It isn’t fear. It’s disinterest. Imagining on how other people really experience technology still “Maybe I should know more, but probably not” Most people still dont’ like to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day. Maybe mobility will make it seem less overwhelming… it’s still about connecting people to people”
Internal MJ Monologue: Wow. Crazytalk. (I’m kidding – For me that’s the duh phenomena. Bringing out to real people for real solutions to real lives)
Anil: Your social netowork doesn’t work when you can’t take it with you.
Jason: If a technology actually enhances people’s lives other than being for the sake of technology
Chad: It amazes me still sometimes how many people have never heard of flickr. I taught my dog walker how to use Flickr. Now I see pictures of my dog being walked on the beach while I’m at work. After I got her on Flickr, her dog walking business boomed.
Internal MJ Monologue: And that’s why Photobucket still grows my monster quantities.
Jason: Will an application be more successful when you have multiple ways to broadcast it in? SMS? IM? Blogging?
Anil: Behavior goes by community. Fans of a certain band will all blog by IM or communicate by IM. Other communities will use the tools common with that group. Personally, I can’t stand using twitter by my phone. For the SMS spam. I use it on IM.
Jason: How big can it [blogging, communities of bloggers, etc] be before it becomes unmanageable? And related trends?
Anil: The mental model for big corporations is “you’re going to use MY product” but the reality is “I’m using all the above” I’m using Flickr for my photos which is a yahoo property and videos from youtube which is a google property. I think in 2007 it’s going to be mashups that together that makes it a bigger trend.
Jason: Is there a place for everything then?
Chad: Yes. And it’s called Yahoo.com (crowd laughs)
Jason: Are mashups to some degree a signal to the application developers that there’s some failure or limitation to the service where other services and companies need to create a solution?
Jason: The idea of a company being able to do something like ” make a mashup of some kind that writes an applicaiton tat pulls data from a number of different places and then host it…we’re also going to host it without physical assets but on a web service altogehter…that’s like amazon”
Anil: virtualization is now a product because you can, like game emulators, build applications on top of hardware.”
Jason: Hardware has outstripped development than network.
Chad: “In the cloud … acquired for some sum of money”
Internal MJ Monologue: Shit. I missed something good while i was outside.
Chad: When I logged on to Amazon’s web server. It’s a gigantic accelerator having that virtualization there.
Jason: We end up with the same trend. Lower barriers of entry for developers and development.
Anil: Does that lowered threshold…
Jason: “infrastructure…blahblahblah”
Internal MJ Monologue: Shit. I just glazed over like a apple fritter donut. Sorry! I’m sure whatever you said was super smart and insightful!
Internal MJ Monologue: Wow. I really suck at live blogging. This is hard. even with being able to type about 85 words per minute.
Evelyn: The thing that’s interesting about being “in the cloud” it’s nice seeing small business liek bakeries, cafe,s etc. it’s more accessible.
Jason: I see a phenomena of people replacing full feature brochure styled sites to blogs instead.
Anil: There’s no visual basic for web aps just yet. There’s this promise of that maybe this is what ruby on rails will do… but the experience of it is sitll overall pretty miserable
Chad: This is another predicition for 2007 “Writing sofware is not going to get any easier.” Chad references “No silver Bullet” – the problems are going to get harder even as some of the tools become easier.
Internal MJ Monologue: I love that anil mentioned tetris as a result of Jason’s shout out re: Win32 etc. Man. I feel old. And man. I miss tetris. I can’t believe Annie (exroomie) used to play left hand vs right. She was *that* geeky. Take that, biyatches.
Chad: Amazon S3 went down for a few hours and those things are still going to happen
Jason: And we smoked a cigar (giggle)
Chad: Describes BBAuth … and whether identity should go into discussions or such…
Audience Member: “I’m on one side of the email divide form my kids. I don’t understand why they do this… Facetime (sic) Myspace, but why my kids are…so into it. I keep on thinking “So what” Blog’s aren’t that interesting.” Even blogs on topics that I am interested in but frankly, it doesn’t begin to approach the quality of a good discussion group. Why should doing it on a blog make it more avluable to my life? And it’s all about monetization at the end of the day.
Anil: I think you’re absolutely right. Have you ever read someone else’s email? Not that interesting either. It’s only interesting, probably, to the pepole that it’s directed for.
Internal MJ Monologue: Kvetching. Awesome.
Evelyn: 2007 is the year that people realize that it’s not about everyone having their own printing press. It’s about having richer community.
Anil: Divorce the technology from the value of the content. Brings analogy of lipsynching into a hairbrush as a kid. And having the common sense to not put it on the internet.
Internal MJ Monologue: Which.Prince.Song.Was.It? SING ANIL! SING!
Chad: The thing that ties all this together is search. A personal example, the one item that is visited the most on my blog …my legacy is how to charge a laptop on a plane. And after 15 years …if I died today, that’s what I’d be remembered for.
Evelyn: The online community is only really an icebreaker. Real friendships come from real meetings after that. You meet someone for the first time IRL after reading their blog for a while, you drop the small talk immediately. It’s about still real people connecting with each other.
Audience: (Digesting kvetch) What do you think of this article re: VC’s asking their kids to evaluate some of this new stuff that maybe those vc people feel out of touch with
Anil: VC Kids are FREAKXORS (No he didn’t really say this)
Anil: (What he really said) They’re very atypical. I’d find more valuable information on line doing a blog search and finding out what the kids are really saying about the product.
Jason: (I actually missed exactly what Jason said but it was something like calling Amazon a bunch of liars.)
Anil: Markets of abundance versus Markets of scarcity. “It still breaks my brain” DRM is for denying abundance.
Search tools are insufficient because in many ways a lot of the tools are still based on markets of scarcity when it’s changed.
Even if you make something free. It doesn’t mean people will want it.
Internal MJ Monologue: Wow. This is a long session. I need another coffee.
Evelyn: Speaking re small is the new big. The global microbrand etc. You don’t need to have a big organization or enterprise to be successful.
Anil: I’m a little skeptical of the small teams can change the world
Evelyn: Small teams but do them well.
Anil: There’s still the ubiquity. It’s still very hard with a small team of say 3 to get half a million users.
Jason: For externally facing stuff. You have to be the number one user of your own services. Ie in my forums. i post about 5 times more than anyone else on there. And that’s the way it should be. I should absolutely be using it.
Anil. <10% of Fortune 500 companies are using our blog tools internally. In many cases it’s teams asking for forgiveness and not for permission from their IT teams to create team updating and knowledge tools.
Internal MJ Monologue: OK. That’s it. Dunkin donuts time glazed eyeballs.
My apologies to everyone who read this far down.It’s a mess of transcription.
And sorry speaker people and everyone for completely massacring your statements.
——
Evelyn: Relationships can not be solved with technology.
Anil: Anecdotes re: relationships can, however, be really enhanced with tools that are out there. Ie Vox. ie. Flickr.
—-
And yes now. It’s 8:45 and the conversation has devolved into toilet (paper) humor.
Awesome.
Wrapup Predictions;
Jason: Web & Desktop applications will merge. No differences.
Chad: No one will care anymore re: RSS because it’s everywhere.
Anil: Nintendo Wii has a measurable affect on behavior and perception of gaming. PS3 will be a huge flop and take blueray down with it.
Evelyn: More people will realize that blogging has less to do with tv and radio and more about tribal camp fliers and barbershops and cafes. Carbon neutral is an interesting idea. Encouraging.
