Cogblog

I am in Boston at An Event Apart today and tomorrow.

In Boston? Want to hang out? Email me pronto!

Regardless, this is great stuff for thinking about some of the problems of the Internet, although I have to admit this is a different crowd for me. It has been weeks since I attended a conference (I attended EconAds, Advertising 2.0, Graphing Social Patterns, and WebWidgetExpo in the last month) that didn’t kick off with “There are our Flickr tags, this is our twitter hashtag”. This is, for all of the roll-up-sleeves of the event, a slightly less geeky crowd in that respect.

It is also interesting because it is a rare event where I tolerate people talking for an hour and a half. However, because this is a series of deep dive presentations, it is working so far.

Jason Santa Maria with a great presentation on design completely outside my comfort zone. But it did make me think about something he didn’t directly mention but is correlated: Every web site starts with what is essentially a table of contents. How many people navigate magazines using the table of contents? Some. Not many. The New York Times doesn’t lead with a list of articles and authors.

SEO wants tables of contents. This is tension.

I was talking to some friends the other day and I said, “You know, nobody talks about quitting their job to build Facebook applications like they used to. The clamp-down on virality has taken the fun out of it.”

What I meant by that was that they key to the Facebook platforms attractiveness was that people leveraging Facebook’s installed base and the viral capabilities of the original Facebook application platform could rapidly build multi-million user bases for their application. You can’t get that just building an average web site. That offered a tremendous value to people that had “ideas”.

Now that Facebook has clamped down and MySpace took its lessons from Facebook and never allowed applications to get significant traction, the value in application development for these platforms has declined significantly.

Several things I saw recently made me think even more about this:

• I will be at Graphing Social Patterns East this week and I saw David Genzel’s bio where he describes himself thusly: “I make viral apps“. My understanding is that SocialMedia is kind of out of the application business. Regardless, I have to wonder what apps he has made viral lately without heavy marketing through the SocialMedia network. He got in at the right time and reaped the benefits. Now, no one would say he is not a smart guy, but I think his smart-ness in this particular instance was probably as much recognizing opportunity and seizing it as it was building a better widget (that’s a tongue in cheek comment if ever there was one).
• Slide recently announced that they will not be launching any new applications, just enhancing old applications. A cynic’s view would be that they have recognized that launching new applications is simply too hard with the new restrictions and there is no need when they could simply add the new applications functionality to existing applications instantly provides the same target distribution and potential page views. I anticipate that they will actually take their huge successes like Funwall and turn them into “platforms on top of platforms”. Funwall will become the new Microsoft Office suite of the Internet, with everything but the kitchen sink available right from your wall!

The platforms on top of platforms direction is not in Facebooks best interest - they are best served by atomization of applications allowing microfunctionality additions - and increasing disinterest among small developers will probably force Facebook to reconsider some of the decisions they have made to throttle application growth.

Going to be all over the place, so I want to see everybody and hook you up with Cogmap stickers.

Plans look like this:

1) June 3 - EconAds Conference in NY

2) June 4 - Advertising 2.0 Conference in NY

3) June 10-11 - Graphing Social Patterns East in D.C.

4) June 16-17 - Web Widget Expo in NY

5) June 23-24 - An Event Apart in Boston

6) June 25-27 - Hanging out in NY

Shoot brent at this domain an email if you want to hang out.  I know I have to post more, incidentally.

Cosi
6181 Old Dobbin Lane Suite 200
Columbia, MD 21045
Phone: 410-953-6311

(The Cosi opens at 9am, so don’t come early)

Cosi was selected because it has free wireless, so bring your laptop and be ready to demo your stuff!

Drinks are plentiful, food not so much.  Maybe eat before you come.

Please circulate to the appropriate audience. The goal is to keep it smaller rather than bigger, so forward with consideration. Shoot me back an email if I should add you to an email reminder list. Also, given that we are just getting started, a quick email to tell me if inviting you hit the right audience would be inordinately valuable.

Our initial invite list is hopefully a nice combination of coders, business people, and investors, so theoretically we should have a diverse and interesting audience.

Thank you, we look forward to seeing you!

Hanging out at SocialDevCampEast before I head to Bangalore in the afternoon.

Greg Yardley, one of my most favoritest bloggers, came down from NYC!

The sessions feel like they are starting an hour late, which totally crunches my time here.

This is an email we circulated recently that I wanted to share on the blog:

Are you familiar with OpenCoffee? OpenCoffee is an activity that connects entrepreneurs, angels, and other Web 2.0 people in an informal setting.

We are starting up just such an event. It will be held every other week at 9:00 am starting April 21st at the Cosi in beautiful Columbia, MD:

Cosi
6181 Old Dobbin Lane Suite 200
Columbia, MD 21045
Phone: 410-953-6311

(The Cosi opens at 9am, so don’t come early)

Cosi was selected because it has free wireless, so bring your laptop and be ready to demo your stuff!

Please circulate to the appropriate audience. The goal is to keep it smaller rather than bigger, so forward with consideration. Shoot me back an email if I should add you to an email reminder list. Also, given that we are just getting started, a quick email to tell me if inviting you hit the right audience would be inordinately valuable.

Our initial invite list is hopefully a nice combination of coders, business people, and investors, so theoretically we should have a diverse and interesting audience.

Thank you, we look forward to seeing you!

Getting the word out, lots of travel coming up.  Shoot me an email if we should talk:

• Boston February 7-10
• NYC February 13?
• FOWA in Miami - February 28-March 1
• SxSW Interactive - March 7-March 11
• PcampSiliconValley - March 15

Not all of this is locked and loaded, but it is interesting.  Will you be there?

With the new arrival in my family, it is a little tricky, but I know I should go!  Anyone planning to be in NYC and want to get a cup of coffee?

God forbid someone reads the Cogblog that is not already a close personal Cog, if you are in San Francisco and want to hang out this week, drop me an email - brent at cogmap dot com.