Recap: Day 1 Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

Day 1 of O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns is in the books and it was a great day with a lot of great content.

I live blogged the event HERE, so check it out.

A lot of the talk today revolved around widgets, it seems to be thehot topic of the day as we have seen a couple of funding rounds recently for the local Clearspring and also RockYou from out west.

Hooman Rafdar, CEO of Clearspring, gave a great talk on widgets.  He had a couple of interesting points but the one I took away most form it was

the only constant in all of this is change …

try new things FAST and use data.

Between his talk and another panel on widgets moderated by Allen Stern of CenterNetworks a key concept was to make sure that you take the time to develop a good widget strategy before diving into the deep end.

Another one of tha talks was by Adam Nash of LinkedIn.  He talked about LinkedIn’s stratey in buidling a business social network and their tring to make it all very relevant to the professional.

There was a lot of talk about the differences between Advertising and App-vertising, and how social applications have become a new way to advertise by combining content and the ad into one unit.

Frank Gruber moderated a panel on White Label Social Networks.  There was a good discussion on building out of these kind of instant on social networks and the tools that are the best to use.  There is a video of this talk HERE, so check it out.

We had a great look into the class taught by Dave McClure at Stanford on building Facebook apps and how succesful it was,  They have had over 20 million installs of some of the apps that were built out of the class.  Several companies have been formed and many of those students have no shortage of job offers.

And finally there was a great panel on “Need for Feeds” and how networks and users are using their news feeds.  I found the talk of making those feeds even more tailored to the user and how this will play out in the future extremely interesting and engaging.  It seems this is the next direction for many.

Off to Day 2 !

Note:

Photos above courtesy of:

Shashi Bellamkonda www.shashi.name and www.solutionsarepower.com.

Frank Gruber of www.somewhatfrank.com