I am not a huge fan of Facebook, I am more a MySpace person because well, I am getting older and it seems more primitive and understandable to me. But today through one of those many many email newsletters i get I saw there was a graphing social networks conference coming up. I immediately thought, how many people are into social graphs that there can actually be a conference? Isn’t that the play of uber programmer geeks and UI specialists? It’s a very exclusive club that I can’t join because my UI experience is low and my programming experience is non-existent. But yet I am still curious, like many people are, about emerging internet things. We all wonder when visual search and semantic search will finally really happen. It’s like the holy grail of convergence, that like true convergence, may not actually happen.
But what I found out about this conference is it’s not about drawing webs of how many people you know on the internet and linking them by different colors in Venn diagrams about their shared tastes. It is about things like facebook apps and social network applications off of the networks too. It has all the technorati A lister dignitaries attending, which means like the old blogging conferences I used to attend (Syndicate anyone?) it probably is too cutting edge and these technologies won’t go mainstream or won’t make money or both. They will have a lot of very intelligent discussion but alas its more about convincing eachother of their superior sales pitch or their product’s whiz bang goodness, and not really going much farther than that.
Plus I just saw some disappointing results from Facebook on a personal note with some work that I have been doing. MySpace performs way better in the way we needed them to. But it’s always neat to get distracted from work and go play around with some neat new cool sites and think about their data and what they have to say about trends in the internet world. So here are some cool sites that are sponsoring the conference. I’d skip the conference and maybe not work with these companies just yet, but I would keep an eye on it all for a little while and see where it goes. It could be huge you know… (Hype!)
http://www.popfly.com/ I got an invite but because I don’t have developer API keys, I can’t do anything with it.
Topix.com I’m not a fan, but recently some of their local commenting pages have given me hope to local search and communities. Maybe it was a good buy?
http://www.sometrics.com/demo/ Coolio! But I have no idea what this is good for except popular facebook apps and what some limited demographics are for the users… (I say coolio when I mean cool, it’s left over from about 10 years ago, sorry)
http://www.socialmedia.com/ A smaller less popular version of a sometrics.
The others like Plaxo aren’t my faves, but hey they might be useful for you…Check them out and see what you think…I’m not hyping anything.
The Protagonist 