Stubbleblog

I’m going to be part of the Flooding the Social Networks: The State of the Union on SNS Tech panel at Web 2.0 Expo, Tuesday 8:30am.

There’s going to be some folks on the panel who are even more interesting and famous than I am (imagine!). Based on the back channel emails I can say confidently that this is Web 2.0 Expo’s must-see session. Here are the actual luminaries:

Lev Grossman, sci-fi author, Time magazine author, and Time nerd culture blogger, will moderate.

Denise Paolucci, general speaker-to-users over on LiveJournal.

Emily Greer, co-founder of Kongregate, an online hub for user submitted Flash games.

Konstantin Guericke, CEO of jaxtr and co-founder of LinkedIn.

Larry Halff, founder of Ma.gnolia.com and bay area foodie.

I think the format’s going to be pretty free flowing, but we did get some questions to ponder ahead of time. Here are some quick answers

Given the new opportunities that these vast social networks provide, how can you design services for social networks?
Design your service so that it hits one of danah boyd’s life stages for people using social media.

If you’re designing a social network or social web site, what trends, best practices, or ideas are important and worth following?
Think multi platform/device. Twitter takes off each time they add a platform: SMS, web, RSS, web.

Which are worth avoiding like the common cold?
Feature-bloat.

As a side note, some readers may be wondering what I’m doing on a social networks panel. Well I did help launch O’Reilly Connection, a social network for techies. And I was a part of several social software sites, Odeo, Twitter, and Wesabe. But the real reason has to do with how I’m listed in the program:

Tony Stubblebine, Lead Software Engineer, Crowdvine

What’s this? Did I change jobs AGAIN?!? Yup. I don’t know where the Lead Software Engineer title came from — I guess somebody googled me and crafted a title from three different jobs. I’m actually the founder.

CrowdVine is a roll-your-own social network company. The idea is to make it easy for anyone to create and customize a social network for niche communities. The thing about niche social networks is that many of the most passionate niches aren’t big enough to get focused commercial attention but they don’t need commercial attention because they’re filled with passionate people who are fantastic candidates to setup and run a community. Some communities are best served with a message board, but other communities really need a way to connect people. Enter CrowdVine.

It’s in unofficial beta, moves into official beta May 1, and launches mid-June. The dates have everything to do with how I’m (self) funding this. That’s a topic for another post.

Here’s the powerpoint from my Web 2.0 talk at Sonoma County Web Developers.

The latest web trends are enabling incredible business opportunities at almost cost. The people hyping these trends as Web 2.0 are too immersed in the technology and the pundentry to apply the trends where the real value is, everyday problems and needs, most of which already have been solved but are ripe for improvement or replacement.

These trends are hot, their implementation costs low, and their business applications untouched.

That’s the theme behind my upcoming talk at Sonoma County Web Developers, “Web 2.0: Opportunities to Make It Big While Keeping It Small,” 6:30PM Tuesady April 11, Santa Rosa, CA

Official Announcement | Directions

The SCWD is the perfect group to have this talk with. They’re some of the most pragmatic and down-to-earth developers I’ve ever met and I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity.

I’ll focus mainly on three areas:

User Generated Content - Give people a voice and they’ll speak. Give them tools and incentives and they will fill your site with content. Hint: the incentive is not money.

Web Services/Components - Companies want to give you features for your website. For free. Most of these features are prohibitively expensive to build on your own.

Blogvertising - Blogs are fantastic for cheap marketing. You don’t even have to write a blog to take advantage.

Quinn just announced that I’m speaking at San Francisco Perl Mongers this month, Sept 27th at 8:00pm.

The current talk is titled “Pizza and Single Sign-On.” I’d like to rename it “How Single Sign-On Saved Me from Gathering Requirements” but I think pizza is a bigger draw.

The talk will range from big multi-domain website-spanning Single Sign-Ons to simple shared authentication schemes that let you integrate somebody’s premanufactured wiki with your existing site. Before settling on integration of existing social software we’d dabbled in writing the software ourselves. The result was best summed up by Make publisher Dale Dougherty, “We don’t want to be blog developers.”

It’s a question of focus, not of expertise. Although we seemed capable of writing our own blog (or wiki or forum) software, doing so would mean focusing on the latest features and fads of said software. Keeping up with user’s expectations means a lot of requirements gathering. And we’d rather be focused on our real job, which is finding and publishing on new technologies.