Category: 1

I tell ya, it’s hard to keep up with Kara Swisher and her little video camera. On Thursday evening we went to two parties. I was enjoying one of my last parties before Milan gets here and both were interesting events.

She has reports from both.

Party I — August Capital.
Party II — iLike celebration of Facebook success.

I show up in one of the videos admitting that I’m a loser. You gotta listen to see why I say that.

It’s a tough life partying with journalists from Newsweek, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Kara. But someone has to do it.

Valleywag was at iLike too, catching all the mustaches.

If there’s one reason why I hate corporate marketing departments it’s that they always want your data. Why? To study it. To justify their existence to their bosses.

I saw this pressure up close and personal when the team I was on, Channel 9, was pressured to use Passport and force people to sign up.

Stefanie Olsen at ZDNet News reports on Rapleaf and Upscoop who are collecting email addresses, among other things, from Facebook and other platforms, and reportedly selling them to marketers.

When I worked at a magazine back in the 1990s I saw this up close and personal too. Did you know that magazines trade your shipping address? Often they collect up to $.08 an address, too. There are entire businesses that do nothing but sell these mailing lists and provide more revenues to publishers.

These are just a modern version of those businesses.

Translation: more commercial crap you don’t want is coming to your social network and your email soon.

Sigh.

UPDATE: Judi Sohn says I totally missed the point here and links to responses from Rapleaf to Stefanie’s post.

UPDATE2: I totally got this one wrong. See my comments here for more info.

Danny Sullivan reports that Google is getting a bit more like Facebook by enabling a Facebook-style news feed within its Orkut social networking site. I know a few people were briefed on that last week so I’m sure more info will come out soon.

The problem for Orkut is much deeper than just the news feed, though. The UI on Facebook is a lot nicer, and the application platform is going to continue getting PR until someone provides a more powerful one.

There’s a TON of new Facebook conferences/events coming soon.

Here’s a list of the ones I know about.

1. Dave McClure’s Graphing Social Patterns. I’m speaking, this one looks like the best one. October 7-9 in San Jose, CA, USA.

2. Noah Kagan is planning CommunityNext’s Platform, October 5-6 in Sunnyvale, CA, USA (only a few miles away from Dave’s confabb). Noah used to work at Facebook and this one looks great for developers.

3. Christian Perry, who plans the most awesome SF Beta events, is planning a conference for late October. It’ll be announced in a week.

4. Steve Broback, who planned the Blog Business Summits over the past few years, has started a new WebCommunityForum in Seattle in December.

Me? I keep thinking that all these conferences are missing the real action.

I am working on that. It’s called Starfish. Code name for what’s really going on in Social Media.

What’s funny is that I’ve been talking about my Starfish idea (sorry, not ready to discuss it in public yet) and nearly everyone who I mention it to asks me “have you read “The Starfish and the Spider” yet?”

It’s amazing how many people have read that book from a cross-section of the industry.

So, I was blown away when I ran into Rod Beckstrom, one of the co-authors of that book, while walking the halls at the Office 2.0 Conference this week.

We had a nice chat and we’ll definitely get together soon for a video interview.

He’s onto something. One of these Facebook events should hire him to speak.

Oh, and what else has he done? He’s the chairman for Twiki.net. One of the more powerful wiki environments around.

Anyway, back to my original question: how many Facebook conferences do we need?

Sean Earp, of Microsoft, is one of a few people I’ve seen gushing about a new version of Microsoft’s search engine coming soon (they have a search press event coming on September 26th).

Is Microsoft about to get back into the search game? I can’t wait to see.

Thank you to David Armano who reported on the work of some real-world heroes. Where did he do that? On Twitter, of course.

Three highschool kids. Heroes.

…for Robert Scoble and Facebook.

Me? I had a good excuse. Maryam is pregnant and needed me at home today.

But what was Facebook’s excuse? Not wanting to be open? Not wanting to play well with others?

Hmmm.

John McCrea of Plaxo says that Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google were there. But not Facebook.