Biggest takeaway: twitter is an excellent example of the current web.
It’s a platform, it enables a plethora of applications based on the twitter api, but still has to find a way to monetize.
Day 1 : Ricardo Baeza – Yates of Yahoo Research, Jeff Jarvis – What Would Google Do, Andrew Keen – web2.0 Hater , Matt Mullenweg – WordPress and Chris Sacca – venture capitalist.
Baeza has no Twitter account. Amazing.
His message – Future of search. No longer about doc retrieval. Retrieving objects based on attributes. Based on intent. Interesting projects: SearchMonkey (Giving publishers API to push real data to Yahoo search index)
Yahoo Research Sandbox (Interesting technologies – correlator, tagexplorer)
Baeza focused on search and making search more intelligent. There was nothing really new in his talk. I expected more. New was the fact that he does not participate in Twitter.
Jeff Jarvis is a captivating speaker. He tries to apply Googlism to other companies. Googlism, being Googley. It boils down to being a platform. An enabling platform – facilitating innovation.
If carmakers would be more Googley they would design carfactories that could be used by other (smaller, greener) companies to innovate. Kinda like an API.
If carmakers would take on Googlism they would create cars that are platforms. Cars that could be personalized, configured by its users and enabling other technologies to be buildt on top of the car. Cars would have had iPod jacks for years now;)
Interesting observation by Jarvis: “Google weakness is that it needs the content to ferment like cheese. Twitter is about now.” Realtime search.
Andrew Keen is a self-proclaimed internet critic. His talk was improvised, with one slide (1663 Vermeer painting) and very good. I found him to be not so critical, more analytical.
Andrew is a big fan of Twitter. It is an example of the age of individualism. The industrial age has been replaced. It’s about the individual now. It’s not a idealistic but more of a social statement.
Then Andrew goes on to declare amateurism dead, and useless. High traffic sites like youtube can’t seem to monetize the petabytes of amateur content they have amassed. But Twitter users with lots of followers seem to be willing to pay for the Twitter service.
Andrew also has a warning. This age of individualism could give rise to extremists. Individuals are becoming brands, but politically this could lead to nasty stuff.
Matt Mullenweg’s talk was somewhat of a disappointment. Matt is the founding developer of WordPress. He talk about opensource and three levels of freedom: Freedom to help yourself, Freedom to help your neighbour, Freedom to help your community. Matt did his presentation in prezi.com. That was really cool btw.
Chris Sacca decided to be interviewed by Andrew Keen instead presenting a keynote. The interview was mostly about Chris’s career, his work at Google and Twitter and his current charity work. Not really notable.
