Recap: Day 2 Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

Well we have wrapped up day 2 of Graphing Social Patterns East 2008 and it was a huge success.  Dave McClure and the rest of the O’Reilly team should really be congratulated.  Thanks to all of them for putting on such a great conference, especially in our backyard here, DC.

HERE are my live notes from the day.

In any case, day 2 here was a great follow up with some more great content for us all, and the popcorn and snacks at the break were not so bad either The day started off with a couple of geat talks by Google and MySpace.

Patrick Chanezon and Paul McDonald gave a great talk about Google’s newest product, the Google App Engine.  It is their foray into the cloud computing space aiming at making the barriers for entry to developers very very low.  I have beena huge Amazon EC2 fan and am happy to see Google get into the mix.  Then Allen Hurff of MySpace followed up with a really good presentation of MySpace’s foray into building out their developer platform.  They have done a lot of work in a very short amount of time and really opened up to the community.

The next session was a panel from Facebook with Dave McClure at the moderator helm, and it was a great time.  He gave no slack and asked the tough questions to the panel.  Unfortunately there was not too much info spilled by the Facebook team.  They must be some sort of politicians or something.  When Dave asked how many companies Facebook has invested in from the Facebook Fund, Ben Ling answered, “somewhere between 2 and 10″ …..  ahh very specific, thanks for the details

Patrick from Google came back on with a small panel to chat about OpenSocial, Google, platform it teamed with Yahoo and MySpace to open up, consisting of RESTFul API calls and some javascript to give users across many platforms a better experience.

After lucnh we heard from a great panel on platforms, building it or buy it.  There was representatives from Mashery, Bebo, Friendster, and Salesforce.  Again the talk was about applications and platforms along with the security implementation.  I found Salesfroce.com’s approach interesting.  Since all of their app’s are installed by users on a pay per app basis, they only workd on creating their platform as a server (paas).

We then had an interesting panel on metrics and a number of companies who have cropped up in this area to help users and developers of these social applications good data.  According to the panel, Google Analytics are not built ot gather this type of data, wherewas their apps are from the API on up.

Nick O’Neill, local DC blogger and founder of Social Times, moderated a panel on the virality and “stickiness” of social apps.  The consensu was that due to some policies put in place on platforms like Facebook, virality seemed to have diminished somewhat.

The conference wrapped up with a couple of talks on monetizing those social apps and also a very important topic of data portability.  Head over to Inside Facebook for a great detailed wrap of each session.

Again, it was a great time.  I met some great people and saw some old friends.  We can only hope we are lucky enough to host this event next year.

Photos above courtesy of:

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