The new Bing Maps geo­tar­gets Twit­ter tweets.

Super­nova roundup: Media, real-time ser­vices — and ‘the end of the Web era’

I spent Wednes­day at the Super­nova con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco, which has mor­phed over the years from a gath­er­ing about mobile and tele­phony into one that addresses the larger themes sweep­ing through soci­ety: Social media. The real-time Web. Pub­lic pol­icy in a con­nected soci­ety. New tech­nolo­gies that rewire our culture.

Given the enor­mously impres­sive attendee list, Super­nova may now have the high­est sig­nal to noise ratio of any con­fer­ence in the tech galaxy. I’ve writ­ten about Super­nova in 2004, 2005 (here’s Cate­rina Fake and a Flickr set), 2006, 2007, and have spo­ken there twice — and, indeed, it was at Super­nova 2004 that Marc Can­ter and I hatched the plan for Our­me­dia’s launch in March 2005 as the first video host­ing and shar­ing site.

But this year’s Super­nova may be the best one yet. It con­cludes this afternoon.

Please read on — you can skip the next six months of con­fer­ences, sav­ing thou­sands in reg­is­tra­tion fees, just by read­ing this blog entry. Some Super­nova highlights:

Is media get­ting more … feminine?

The “Is There a Media Busi­ness?” panel pro­vided a lively give and take with the 75 or so par­tic­i­pants in the ses­sion, and it focused less on the tra­vails of the news busi­ness than on the larger forces churn­ing through the media land­scape: music and movies as well as news. I found it inter­est­ing that I had pro­filed two of the three par­tic­i­pants, Jim Grif­fin and Cory Ondrejka, in my book Dark­net. (You can read the chap­ter on Grif­fin at Pho, Cole Porter and Tarzan eco­nom­ics.)

The high­light for me came when Jim Grif­fin alluded to tra­di­tional media as quin­tes­sen­tially male in nature — push­ing out prod­uct through blunt force and “the need to con­sum­mate a rela­tion­ship with­out even get­ting your name” — while Lisa Stone and the pan­elists agreed that there may be a “fem­i­niza­tion of media” under­way, where the value comes from cre­at­ing a rela­tion­ship that never ends. Lisa called it the “coope­ti­tion” model of media, mutu­ally coop­er­a­tive and competitive.

I think there’s some­thing to this: Social media is all about rela­tion­ship build­ing, about giv­ing more than tak­ing, and women still top men in that department.

After Lisa cited news pub­lish­ers’ crit­i­cism of Google and the Huff­in­g­ton Post as “tech­no­log­i­cal tape­worms” of the Inter­net — a few hours ear­lier Google announced it would restrict access to fee-based news sites — Cory quipped: “Google is hand­ing a gun to main­stream media, ‘Here, go shoot your­self.’ Do you want your cus­tomers not to find [your arti­cles]? … Mak­ing your con­tent more obscure does not seem like the right approach.”

Grif­fin said more com­pa­nies were in effect becom­ing media enti­ties — like J&J, which pur­chased and is run­ning BabyCenter.com for new and expec­tant par­ents (I used to run its edi­to­r­ial department).

Mid­way through I made the point that the music com­pa­nies and Hol­ly­wood stu­dios deserve some credit for not crack­ing down on the lit­er­ally mil­lions of copy­right vio­la­tions that are appear­ing on YouTube every day. And I argued that the mar­ket­place — we, the peo­ple — have indeed moved the goal posts over the past three years with­out the need for Con­gress to act.

I pre­dict that it will take another three years for Google, the music com­pa­nies and Hol­ly­wood to come to an arrange­ment that pays the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers a share of rev­enue derived from ads on YouTube, some of which will go to the musi­cians, some to the song­writ­ers, some to the stu­dios and so on. But rights are an enor­mously thorny bram­ble bush, and the lawyers and suits will spend years try­ing to fig­ure out the new rules of the road in the dig­i­tal age.

Let’s hope that Google will map the way for cre­ative mashup mon­e­ti­za­tion, just as Apple pio­neered the way for music com­pa­nies to enter the dig­i­tal era after Nap­ster. One hopes that the mashup artist gets a slice of the pie, too.

Real-time Web — or the end of the Web?

Some fas­ci­nat­ing insights dur­ing the after­noon ses­sion “Going with the Flow”:

• Our infor­ma­tion flow is becom­ing more per­son­al­ized. “We don’t need fire­hoses any more,” J.P. Ran­gaswami of BT said at one point.

• From the stage, Web 2.0 impre­sario Tim O’Reilly asked the room­ful of 350 peo­ple: “Is there any­one here who doesn’t use Twit­ter?” One per­son raised his hand.

• O’Reilly again impor­tantly raised the specter of “a bat­tle going on for the soul of the Web”: the Internet’s orig­i­nal decen­tral­ized archi­tec­ture, based on open stan­dards and open for­mats, vs. a new oli­garchy of silos — pro­pri­etary walled-garden approaches we’ve seen to some extent by com­pa­nies like Face­book with its social graph, Google with its search algo­rithm and Microsoft, whose rumored deal with News Corp. is mad­ness.

• O’Reilly sit­ting next to Twit­ter COO Dick Costello: “Does Twit­ter want to be Google or does Twit­ter want to be Tim Berners-Lee? We won’t know the answer till Twit­ter knows what its busi­ness model is.”

• Costello announced that Twit­ter was in the process of reengi­neer­ing its code to give peo­ple archived tweets and “much deeper search” capa­bil­i­ties. So that, for exam­ple, years from now we’ll be able to call up the tweets around the Iran­ian street protests. Twit­ter is look­ing to work with com­pa­nies and the Inter­net Archive as trusted sources to be used as a per­ma­nent archive.

• O’Reilly sensed the emer­gence of “a tran­si­tion yet to come, tak­ing us away from sta­tus updates con­sumed by humans and toward sta­tus updates con­sumed by machines” — par­tic­u­larly devices that know your phys­i­cal loca­tion and then act on it.

• Brett Slakin of Google: “On the con­sumer side, hyper­local­ity is the coolest thing ever” — geo­t­ag­ging so that I can find out, what’s going on at this block right now?

• Here’s one answer. Bar­ney Pell of Microsoft showed off the beta of Bing Maps (see image at top — you may need to down­load Sil­verlight to see it in action). For instance, you’ll be able to see who else is tweet­ing from a par­tic­u­lar city, or even from the same street corner.

• What will Web 3.0 be about? Nobody thew out that term, but Slakin and sev­eral oth­ers sug­gested that the Next Big Thing will be soft­ware and ser­vices that help us fil­ter (a bet­ter term: fun­nel in) rel­e­vant, mean­ing­ful data. Help­ing us “parse the stream,” in Slakin’s words.

• O’Reilly cited soft­ware mashups as show­ing us “a light­weight pre­view of where we need to go” by pulling together data from mul­ti­ple sources.

• “We’re exit­ing the Web era,” O’Reilly declared. “It’s still the Inter­net, but not nec­es­sar­ily http: based.” Many of us now access Twit­ter through mobile devices that use non-Web protocols.

• “I think we’re work­ing toward the Inter­net OS,” O’Reilly added. It could turn out to be a Google OS or Face­book OS or Apple OS — or an open source Linux-style OS. He said he’d like to see play­ers coop­er­ate to build ser­vices that they couldn’t build alone.

• Geek humor. O’Reilly: “Some­body said to me, what is cloud com­put­ing except a bunch of vir­tual machines twit­ter­ing to each other?”

Other slices

• From the floor, Oliver Marks argued that Ash­ton Kutcher (@aplusk on Twit­ter) was using an out­dated mass media par­a­digm because he fol­lows 274 peo­ple and has 4 mil­lion followers.

Non­sense. Even Twitter’s founders have said that fol­low­ing every­one who fol­lows you is a fool­hardy approach — you should only fol­low those whose tweets bring value into your life. Any­one who fol­low more than 1,000 peo­ple knows how dif­fi­cult it is to keep up a gen­uine con­ver­sa­tion. Now, mul­ti­ply that by 4,000 times.

• I missed John Hagel’s appear­ance but will catch it today on uStream.

• Funny back and forth. Jim Grif­fin: “We’re embrac­ing the chan­nel Me, where all of us have our own chan­nel.” Lisa Stone: “I’m so not inter­ested in that.”

• Catharine Hays: “Tele­vi­sion isn’t what it used to be, so it’s not old media.”

• Deb Schulz beau­ti­fully addressed the role of adver­tis­ers in the new world (call it the Par­tic­i­pa­tory Era, or per­haps the Shar­ing Econ­omy). She called for “the death of the grand ges­ture” by mar­keters — that is, “Ignore me, ignore me, ignore me — flow­ers on Valentine’s Day. Ignore me, ignore me, ignore me — big Super Bowl ad.”

The once-in-a-blue-moon para­chut­ing into your life is a dying model. The new model: More inter­ac­tiv­ity. Ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tions. Intense participation.

• Flickr co-founder and Hunch founder Cate­rina Fake, who’s one of my favorite peo­ple (and speak­ers) in the tech world: “Through over­promis­cu­ous friend­ing, I’ve had to sift through vast amounts of data, and I’ve become my own computer.”

• More Fake: “Every sin­gle one of us is a spe­cial snowflake. But in other ways we’re very pre­dictable. How many of us have iPhones?” A lot.

• 70 per­cent of Twit­ter use in the U.S. is still via the Twit­ter web­site (instead of via an app), says Jason Shellen, a fel­low SF East Bayer who heads up ThingLabs.

• Laura Fit­ton: “More pro­duc­tiv­ity has been lost by doubt and mis­trust and hos­til­ity than by not hav­ing the right tools.” The key is to get peo­ple to trust one another.

• Anna-Christina Dou­glas of the Google Wave team: “Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion aren’t dif­fer­ent. When­ever you com­mu­ni­cate with some­one, you’re build­ing some­thing.” She said they’re work­ing to make it pos­si­ble to embed waves (still invitation-only ) in other sites.

• Kevin Marks: “With Google you get a machine response. With Twit­ter you expect to get a human response.”

• Deb Schultz: “Talk­ing with a human voice doesn’t go away just because you work for a corporation.”

• Some blue-sky think­ing in the last panel about mashng up Hunch (a deci­sion ser­vice) and Aard­vark (social search engine) or Dopplr and Tripit (two social travel plan­ning sites).

• Anil Dash, who left Six Apart last month, is head­ing up Expert Labs, a mech­a­nism for cre­at­ing and evan­ge­liz­ing Gov­ern­ment 2.0 tools.

Some of the par­tic­i­pants on hand

I love attend­ing gath­er­ings like Super­nova because it’s my chance to catch up with peo­ple I haven’t seen in ages. Among those I chat­ted up or saw from yesterday’s who’s who of attendees:

Esther Dyson, John Hagel III, Doc Searls, David Wein­berger, Cate­rina Fake, Rashmi Sinha (founder of Slideshare), Mark Dra­peau, Dan Fost, Scott Rosen­berg, Josh Kin­berg, Hugh MacLeod, Denise How­ell, Heather Gold, Cathy Brooks, Deb Schultz, Scott Kirsner, Howard Green­stein, Chris Carfi, David Spark, Gary Bolles, Dave McClure, Chris­tine Her­ron, Andrew Rasiej, Tan­tek Celik, Dick Costello, Super­nova orga­nizer Kevin Wer­bach, Tim O’Reilly, Shan­non Clark, Kaliya Ham­lin, Mary Hod­der, Kristie Wells, Kim­berly Lembo, Mon­ica Car­rillo, Bar­ney Pell, Rohit Khare.

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