supernova2008

PopularMedia launching SocialNotes for sharing shopping links

On Monday at Supernova, Google's Joe Kraus gave a hypothetical example of how online shopping could become more social. On Wednesday, I saw the real thing: a new widget from PopularMedia that makes shopping sites a bit more personal.

The SocialNotes product is a widget reminiscent of ShareThis and AddThis; it's code that publishers can drop in to their sites that makes it easy for visitors to send pages off to friends or to embed them in social-network profile pages or blogs. The SocialNotes widget is somewhat more interesting because when the e-mail recipients of a notification go … Read more

The war for talent

According to JP Rangaswami, managing director of BT Design, there is a genuine war for talent.

But the way to attract talent isn't with the most money or best perks but through openness, he said, speaking at Supernova 2008. Companies need to be open to competition, such as partnering with competitors in some areas; open to innovation in terms of creating an environment that encourages new ideas; and open to changes, Rangaswami said.

The talent pool comes from both inside and outside a firm. "Open, multisided platforms are the only way to get to the talent pool," … Read more

Skydeck's cool mobile phone book site being undone by its CEO

Skydeck makes a very cool product, but it is destined for smallness.

The product: It's a service the mobile phone carriers can use to make their Web pages actually useful for their customers. Instead of just showing a bunch of marketing pitches and the minutiae of the customer's bill, a Skydeck-powered site shows phone users who they talk to, either in chronological order or by frequency, and in an extremely comprehensible format. For users whose phones have the necessary software enabled (SyncML), it will also let them manage their phone address books.

Add-ons for social-network sites let users … Read more

Supernova 2008: Leveraging the network for social action

"We are not really wired to grok massive networks of billions of people and billions of connections." That's how Kevin Werbach of the Wharton School kicked off Supernova 2008 in San Francisco. The new study of network science hasn't evolved to a point where we understand enough about the properties of networks to apply the learnings to everyday life and social action.

Clay Shirky , adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, talked about collective action as a network dynamic. It turns out … Read more

Google's view: Three trends in social networking

SAN FRANCISCO-- "Social is the new black," Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said at a talk on the company's social-computing efforts at the Supernova conference here.

Kraus' view, which can be fairly said to represent Google's, is that these are the three big trends in the social Web:

Discovery is becoming social This was the most telling tidbit from Kraus' talk. He noted that searching on Google is good, but having your friends help you find what you're looking for is better. He gave an example of how social discovery can work--putting … Read more