360DigitalInfluence

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy (I won a ticket by commenting on JO’s blog), we were able to attend this past week’s Graphing Social Patterns conference in DC. I sent the better man - Mike Mangi - who heads up our technical development.

I asked him a few questions from his experience and his responses were really thorough.

Me: What was the most interesting idea or meme that surfaced at the conference?

Mike: I thought the most interesting idea discussed at GSP East was the idea of Dynamic Privacy brought up by Dave Morin from Facebook in the session Social Networks and the NEED for FEEDS. This was in response to users asking why they couldn’t export their Facebook news feed. This feed contains actions of your friends whose privacy would be violated if you exported the feed without the permission of your friends. Dynamic Privacy would allow for only parts of the feed to be exported. Perhaps more technically difficult, was the idea that privacy changes could perhaps be retroactively removed from feeds. For example, if you allowed all of your information out in a feed and then changed your mind and blocked the information, the information would be removed from the feed readers of your followers. A bit like retracting a sent email, which is a concept that’s never been implemented in a way that really works.

Me: Give me an interesting futurecast that came out of the group

Mike: An interesting prediction came from Benjamin Joffe in the session Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for Mobile Devices). He predicted that as companies and schools lock down access to social networks on the PCs they provide, employees and students will be driven to use mobile social networks. I think we’re already seeing that in the U.S. with Twitter.

Me: Got another?

Mike: I also liked an idea for the next killer application that came out of the session Privacy Management & Data Portability for Social Networks. And if someone wants to comment and take credit for it they should; from where I sat it seemed like a group effort from the whole panel. The premise was that people want to feel that their privacy is protected everywhere on the web. And it was hypothesized that users might comment on more blogs if they knew their privacy was protected. The next killer app would allow users to set their profile in one place and be represented everywhere as their true self with that one profile.

Me: What company was hot there?

Mike: Facebook was the darling company of GSP East. Many other companies were based entirely around developing, tracking, or monetizing applications for Facebook. Facebook has made great efforts to communicate with developers to ensure updates to their system (and there is a major profile redesign coming soon) are in the best interest of the end users. Developers respect that.

Me: Did you find a new influencer - someone you found smart and will keep in touch with?

Mike: I stopped by the Clearspring booth and talked with Justin Thorp, a dev community manager. Clearspring is a “Widget Network for building, deploying, monetizing and tracking widgets on the internet.” I really like where Clearspring is going. Especially since Justin mentioned that he has had discussions with Sprout, which has a sweet GUI for widget creation. Justin pointed me to RCRDLBL (am I the last to know about this?) which does a great job of componentizing its content –- just check out the “grab this” links on the center and right column blocks. In fact, I think this would be a great feature for the feed blocks in the media room of our newly redesigned corporate website .

Me: How would you rate the show with 5 being “I’m gonna kill to   go again?”

Mike: I would give the event a 4 out of 5. Too be fair I missed Monday and all of the morning sessions. I felt like Apple (for mobile) and Google (for analytics) where conspicuously missing from the conference. I would go again next year if those two companies showed up.