Game Legends Live on stage

I must admit this was one of the highlights of the Web 2.0 Summit. Listening to the panel on gaming with Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision (Creator of guitarhero!) and Trip Hawkins, CEO of Digital Chocolate (and founder of Electronic Arts!).

Hawkins, an advocate of casual gaming, claims we are headed toward a world of immersive, social content. A world in which content isn’t something that we pay to watch or listen to, but something we pay to participate in–a social experience.

Life is a game

Here is an excellent example of "life as a game". Michelle plays "My car is a video game" (to see how far she can go on one tank of gas). "Hence, I must continually beat my high score, which right now is 52.4 MPG for a whole tank." Read more.

I always do this, but my Saab 9.5 does not give me the same type of feedback as her car.

Competition between email and social networks

(this image has nothing to do with the WSJ article)

Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again?

Prediction: This article in the Wall Street Journal will be discussed and cited by a lot of people in the coming weeks.

Great speaker, great slides

Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson.

Mary Meeker, leader of Morgan Stanley's global technology reserach team, is the fastest, smartest and post PPT-packed speaker I have ever seen. Her slides were AMAZING. (And you know I am not exactly a PPT-fan).

Download them from Morgan Stanley.

Everybody wants to be a platform

Chris DeWolfe, founder, MySpace
Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson.

I am at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. This is the event where everyone wished they were a platform. Mark Zuckerberg explained how Facebook shall become the new platform for all the social activities on the web. Zuckerberg also described the notion of the ’social graph’. Zuckerberg said “it’s the set of conenctions that a person has in the world” and that Facebook is simply trying to map this. He said it’s about exposing people's connections, but respecting people's privacy. This was really a new concept for me and I think it will have great implications.
Tim O'Reilly, the chair of the conference, expresses a concern over how much Facebook will let third parties use the information generated on the site: "I do think that there are two views of the social graph, though, and how it gets deployed: there's a platform view in which it can be exploited to build smarter applications on Facebook; there's a deeper view in which the Facebook-discovered social graph can be accessed by other applications elsewhere on the net. Facebook's granular control of what information you reveal and to whom is thus a key part of the platform -- but the question is how far Facebook will go in letting other sites use this information. If Mark's answer is the first, Facebook is ultimately a closed platform; if the latter, it becomes a true open platform and value enabler."

Tim O’Reilly's comment is an important one. Will other applications and companies have access to the information on Facebook, or will Facebook be a "walled garden"?

Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson.

By contrast, the conversation between Chris DeWolfe of MySpace and Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp, on Wednesday evening, made clear that MySpace primarily thinks of itself as a media company. MySpace is primarily building a platform for people to manage their personal online presence. Basta.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.

Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson.

Facebook, on the other hand is thinking much more broadly about the future of the net. Zuckerberg: "The early guys who built the company, we discussed building the development platform before we actually built Facebook. It's been incredibly humbling to see all these people developing; we made a conscious decision that we wanted to release this very quickly. Let's get this thing out in the world and see how people are going to use. It's going to take 30 years - or tens of years - before this becomes a really mature platform. It's just been amazing."

"We're not really a media company... The types of stuff we build and the types of problems we solve are deeply technical problems. That's the sort of thing Facebook's going to be interested in building towards."

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The crazy look of Steve Ballmer

The take-away from John Battelle's interview with Steve Ballmer at Web 2.0 Summit: not as self-confident as usual. I got the impression Microsoft is looking to buy a lot of different companies to strengthen their online business. "We're in the game, we've come from nowhere quickly. But we're a relatively small player compared to the market leader (Google). In our games and devices business, what's not to love about Halo 3. There's a lot of good and a lot of areas of improvement", Ballmer said between sips of his iced Starbucks drink.

This is when Steve started to get all red in the face and jumped up and down nearly popping out of his seat: "You're just 3 years old, and we've got you in there playing basketball with a 12-year-old. You're growing up quick and getting better every day, and you've got all the potential in world, and it may take you 'til you're 7, 8, 9 or 10, but you're gonna dunk (screaming) and you're gonna dunk on the other guy some day, Johnny."

But as Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe pointed out. How come Microsoft has used Flash and not their Silverlight software in the Halo 3 site?

We all disagree on Steve Ballmer. Brilliant or crazy? I'll leave it to you to look at this picture.