Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. Chief Tech­nol­ogy Officer.

Social net­works becom­ing more rel­e­vant to offline lives

I have been to every Web 2.0 Sum­mit since its launch except for one (when I had a speak­ing com­mit­ment in Toronto), so it was good to be back at the ven­er­a­ble tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco this week. This year’s event was not a somber affair, but it was con­sid­er­ably smaller in atten­dance: prob­a­bly 50–60 per­cent off its high of a cou­ple of years ago (that’s my esti­mate, not offi­cial). Just look at the Flickr stream: prob­a­bly one-tenth the size of a cou­ple of years ago.

Here’s my Flickr photo gallery of the sum­mit — that’s Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. Chief Tech­nol­ogy Offi­cer, above. I briefly got to meet him back­stage. (Dis­clo­sure: I was admit­ted with a press pass.) His deputy, Andrew McLaugh­lin, dis­sected dumber-than-dumb U.S. reg­u­la­tions — in effect pre­vent­ing Gov­ern­ment 2.0 from tak­ing place — at the Web 2.0 Expo last spring. I asked Chopra about this from the floor and he talked ani­mat­edly about the progress his office is mak­ing in cut­ting the red tape to ribbons.

If there was a theme this year, it was this: Con­tent is get­ting increas­ingly social. We see that through the major social net­works (Face­book, Twit­ter), through news orga­ni­za­tions that are strug­gling to find a busi­ness model (the social journalism-friendly Huff­in­g­ton Post is expand­ing its staff), and through a pan­poly of new “social search” and “real-time search” results rolled out by the major search engines.

The tech press has already cov­ered the news­wor­thy items com­ing out of the Sum­mit (a sis­ter event, Web 2.0 Expo, is held each spring in SF and will be held Nov. 16–19 in New York). Chief among them: announce­ments that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will now offer results from the real-time Web via Twit­ter updates (at bing.com/twitter) and, soon, pub­lic updates on Face­book (no money was exchanged), and Google will now offer a deeper set of Twit­ter updates, includ­ing some­thing called a social cir­cle (social search), due to debut early next year.

So here are some snip­pets of the scene at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit:

Some high­lights of the Summit

• Bing got a pub­lic­ity bump from its new agree­ment with Twit­ter. But Google’s Social Search (above) is expo­nen­tially more inter­est­ing. It indexes con­tent from your social net­works or social tools, such as Yelp, Gmail or one of your social net­works, like Twit­ter. (You’ll need a Google pro­file and account, and it’s strictly opt in.) Look for it on Google Labs. So if you search for a good restau­rant in Boston, at the bot­tom of your search results you’ll see rec­om­men­da­tions from your friends.

• The Huff­in­g­ton Post’s social news fea­ture — let­ting you fol­low news that your friends rec­om­mend — is prov­ing extremely pop­u­lar, said CEO Eric Hippeau.

• OK, I really do love Bing’s visual search, released a month ago. Do a search on dig­i­tal cam­eras, nar­row it down by megapix­els using a slider, choose an opti­cal zoom of over 10x, and bingo! See a hand­ful of good choices. “It changes the way you do search by pulling that data to you,” a Microsoft rep said.

• Newest inter­est­ing site to cross my radar: Answers.com. It’s already one of the largest sites on the Web on the basis of its sim­plic­ity. Ask a ques­tion, or enter a phrase, and get an answer. I thought I’d trip it up by ask­ing Who is the pres­i­dent of Mau­ri­ta­nia, but it spit back this. Nice.

• Aard­vark, at vark.com, is another search start-up, but with this twist: It will comb the most knowl­edge­able peo­ple in your social net­works to come up with an answer (“Tap the knowl­edge of peo­ple in your net­work!”). Per­son­ally, I wouldn’t want to impose on my friends by sub­mit­ting dozens of search queries a day (as I do on Google), but for an off­beat rec­om­men­da­tion, this could work. Aard­vark founder Max Ven­tilla says 90 per­cent of all queries are answered, and 50 per­cent of all queries are answered within 5 minutes.

• Audioboo.fm, an iPhone audio blog­ging app, launched a week ago, con­sul­tant Amy Webb told me. Worth a look. Peter Guber talks about mon­e­tiz­ing con­tent.

• The climb back to respectabil­ity for MySpace is a long one. John Bat­telle polled the large audi­ence: How many are on MySpace? About 10 per­cent shot up their hands? Face­book? Nearly 100 percent.

• Face­book stats: 45 mil­lion sta­tus updates per day from 30 mil­lion indi­vid­u­als. Users spend 8 bil­lion min­utes on the site every day. Over 2 bil­lion pieces of con­tent are shared every week. Over 2 bil­lion pho­tos are uploaded each month, with a total of over 20 bil­lion pho­tos stored on facebook.com.

• MySpace is launch­ing a music aggre­ga­tor and player. Think Hulu for music videos. Try it here.

• Stats on Gui­tar Hero: 40 mil­lion units sold in five years, mak­ing it the sixth most pop­u­lar game sold in history.

• Hand­held devices like the Kin­dle “will be the next great plat­form of inno­va­tion for us,” said Mar­tin Nisen­holtz, senior vice pres­i­dent, dig­i­tal oper­a­tions for The New York Times Com­pany. About one-quarter of the Web 2.0 Sum­mit audi­ence owns a Kin­dle, by a show of hands.

• Nisen­holtz, smartly, on the busi­ness woes of news orga­ni­za­tions: “You have to inno­vate your way out of it.” And: “By 1998, any­one with a brain could see that clas­si­fieds were his­tory. It’s not Craig Newmark’s fault.” And: “Nobody has a right to exist in busi­ness. It’s that simple.”

• My sym­pa­thies go out to Carly Fio­r­ina, recov­er­ing from breast can­cer. If she runs for the U.S. Sen­ate, though, I hope she gets squashed like a fruitfly.

Related

• Google launches social search (Tele­graph UK)

• CNET cov­er­age of the Summit

• Web 2.0 Sum­mit: Fed CTO Talks Health­care IT (Infor­ma­tion Week)

• Media Brawl at Web 2.0 (Contentinople)

• Web 2.0: Facebook’s chal­lenges in scal­ing to 300 mil­lion users (Dig­i­tal Beat)

• 2006 Web 2.0 Sum­mit: Jason Cala­ca­nis on social news (Socialmedia.biz)

• Cov­er­age of Web 2.0 Sum­mit 2006 (Socialmedia.biz)

• Web 2.0 Sum­mit 2008 Day 3: Polit­i­cal round­table, Al Gore (Socialmedia.biz)

• Day 2 of Web 2.0 Sum­mit 2008: GoodGuide and Face­book (Socialmedia.biz)

• Web 2.0 Sum­mit 2008 Day 1: Google.org (Socialmedia.biz)

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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