I just came back from tonight's panel discussion at Stanford GSB, organized by MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB). Truly inspiring event, and the Bishop Auditorium at Stanford was packed. Bit.ly was the star of the night, represented by their co-founder Todd Levy whom I enjoyed meeting again.

Who was on the panel:

• Andreas Weigend - moderator, lecturer at Stanford, former Chief Scientist at Amazon - he kept us entertained with his witty humor
• Todd Levy - cofounder of leading URL shortener and social analytics engine Bit.ly
• Jan Pedersen - Chief Scientist for Bing search, ex-Yahoo :)
• Kevin Burton - founder and CEO of Spinn3r and co-creator of RSS 1.0
• George Zachary - Partner at VC firm Charles River Ventures, invested in Twitter, Yammer ("corporate twitter"), GupShup ("the Twitter of India"), advisor to X PRIZE

The discussion opened with some cool stats, such as what happens each minute on the web: how many blog posts go live (mostly in Asia!), 100,000 bit.ly links clicked, 500,000 items shared on Facebook. See the photo in this post. Andreas has a wonderful way of presenting things, straight from what seemed a Microsoft Office document, and editing what's on the screen as the discussion went on.

Todd shared the history of Bit.ly, which fascinatingly enough started with a handful of employees and to this day has a single digit number of engineers. Their head of science is a woman (this came as an answer to the inevitable question why so few women are in tech). Bit.ly grew out of the needs of other startups getting incubated at Betaworks in NYC - they needed a URL shortener, and they needed to track social analytics, so why not kill both birds with one stone? Today bit.ly offers free analytics, and a premium $995 per month Pro package for companies. I have been in touch with Bit.ly for a long time, a huge fan of the company and the team, and plan to look into (read: buy) their Pro offering soon.

There was an interesting discussion about social implications of the real time web. Does the ability to output bite-sized pieces of info in real time, and keep a bunch of people updated on where you are and what you are doing actually diminish the need for real face to face human contact? In the past you needed to catch up with people, talk at length, and nurture a personal connection. Now you just check on Facebook and voila, you learn all about their last vacation or new baby. Jan made the point that services like Facebook make it much easier to keep in touch with people with whom you normally would not, such as acquaintances or remote friends, and so those relationships are strengthened. Todd made an interesting observation: in the early days of the internet when email was king, you basically had long-latency asynchronous communication. Now with low latency protocols and links, you have real time, sort of what face to face communication is, albeit digital. So we are coming back to the synchronous more direct communication that we lost when email appeared. Interesting...

George Zachary was passionate about real time social services disrupting outmoded corporate and government hierarchies (think Yammer, but also the public services). The Coase theorem states that firms and other organziations exist to lower the cost of transacting business, but these days meeting and bureaucracy make it harder to get things done in-house than if you were to use IM or call someone outside the organization. George expects profound social structure changes in the next 20-30 years as a result of technology allowing us to communicate and express ourselves in real time globally.

Privacy was suprisingly little mentioned. Jan Pedersen spoke about Bing's reluctance to show public Facebook updates which appear to be intended for private use based on some sort of automated analysis (or perhaps he was describing a policy choice, not clear). Here I was reminded of the public expression freedom that Twitter allows in comparison. That, and how I could easily tweet (and did) using SMS with just one bar of phone signal reception, while posting to Facebook on my iPhone would have been a drag (and although it can be done via SMS, who does it?)

The event was superb, one of the best I have attended in recent memory. The handout they gave to the audience had things like a chart of the real time web space (who the players are in the various niches), some interesting analytics of the growth in content over the past year, and definitions of terms like Pubsubhubbub. Kudos to VLAB, and I look forward to attending more of their events!

In the past two days, I attended Chirp, the first developer conference organized by Twitter. It was a fun event with plenty of familiar faces and interesting new announcements.

 

What was most interesting?

Annotations were by far the most intriguing concept mentioned at Chirp. Being able to attach up to 2 KB of metadata to each tweet has set the developer blogosphere on fire.

Here is a great and rather technical post by Marcel Molina from Twitter about annotations: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/fa5da2608865453

Dave Winer predicted that annotations would be the most exciting thing at Chirp, and has eloquently explained some product ideas here: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/09/howTwitterCanKillTheTwitte.html

It looks like most people are thinking that annotations will just add another 2k bytes to remove some of the limitations of the 140 characters – for example, removing the need for URL shorteners, or at least removing the need to dereference a short URL. Or using the 140 char tweet as a title / summary, and attaching more text in the annotation. Or adding richer geolocation tags in the annotations.

I am personally more intrigued by the possibility of using opaque human-unreadable binary annotations which turn Twitter into a real time message bus. For example, imagine traffic lights tweeting their status (red, green, maybe even congestion estimate via traffic camera), and your new GPS receiving tweets from traffic signals in the vicinity, decoding them, and deciding which route will be fastest. No need for you to personally read such tweets, right? Or you can have encrypted annotation payloads which can be a way to broadcast premium content, while possibly keeping the title in the tweet for everyone to see. By the looks of it, though, Twitter probably wants all annotations to be in clear text and usable by the whole community by developers, discouraging building proprietary advantage.

 

@anywhere and Yahoo!

There is no doubt that the most ready-for-primetime new Twitter product discussed at Chirp was @anywhere: http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere

The hack day on Day 2 was also largely focused on this. Yahoo! announced several integrations with @anywhere which will no doubt be among the most visible on the web.

Here is a presentation and video by Cody Simms, head of the Yahoo! Developer Network: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/04/a_report_from_chirp_twitters_developer_conference.html

 

What about Monetization?

Sponsored tweets sound interesting. However, it seemed like the concept is far from ready or well thought out, and here are a number of issues with it: Tweets will be sold on CPM, per impression model. They will initially be available on search.twitter.com only, and that is not a big destination; most of the action still happens in third party Twitter client applications. The ad quality metric called “resonance” (which also seems to be the overall tweet relevance metric developed by Twitter) is rather fuzzy and unrelated to click/action performance, and there is no behavioral or demographic targeting. Basically, ads on Google or Facebook still sound a lot more compelling and better targeted. Which is not to say there isn't a lot of potential for sponsored tweets, but I was hoping a lot more of that to be spelled out at the conference.

 

How to make Chirp better

It seemed like the conference this year was all about Twitter and what they want developers to hear and do (i.e. adopt @anywhere and think of annotations ideas). It felt too much like a PR event for Twitter. It would have been better to hear directly the voices of the ecosystem. By that I do not mean just Q&A using hashtags on Twitter. Unlike what Microsoft does with their developer conferences for example, there was no dedicated space (booths etc) for partners and developers to show off their applications and talk with potential partners and customers. There were random connections and conversations for sure, but there are a ton of great companies building products around Twitter that I wanted to chat with but could not – and I am sure they were actually at Chirp! Perhaps if the venue were larger and had an area with tables where attendees could post signs and logos, this already would be a major improvement. That said, Twitter did an awesome job organizing the conference this year and getting the developers excited, and I am looking forward to their next developer event!