Attended the LeWeb Conference 2009, organised by Loic Lemeur and his wife, Géraldine, on December 9-10, 2009. I collected my top nine thoughts which I am delivering in three separate postings. This is the second of three (here is the first one).
4. The human element. Passion, giving, meaning, real life networking, excellent customer service were recurrent themes interspersed throughout the presentations, well beyond words such as “superior product” and technology. I think of Chris Pirillo, Founder of Lockergnome, who made a rousing speech on the human component of Community; Chris Brogan, author of Trust Agents, talking about the importance of human relations and the need to promote other people and their passions before you promote yourself; Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, “Follow your passion” and “Chase the vision and the money will follow;” Kevin Marks, from BT, I paraphrase “the inclusion of bigger real photos [not avatars] beside each of our twits make words more real”; and finally, the most animated of all, Gary Vaynerchuk, Wine Library TV and author of CrushIT: “I am driven by gratitude” and “I’m not romanced by anything but the message – the platform is irrelevant.” And, on the deep end, we also had Violet Blue talking about the instantaneous orgasm. And for everyone cited above, each person speaking walks the talk.
5. With the ongoing struggle for survival for the news media world, I enjoyed the presentation by Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience of Google. Marissa Mayer said that, as part of the solution, news needs to evolve toward being a ‘living story,” with updates added to the initial story over time such that the article is a living (and linked) document, rather than be static moment-in-time article (newspaper confinement). Marissa spoke of Wikipedia’s coverage of the 2001 Anthrax attacks which covered the news and aggregated for us all the events into one single post as opposed to having to recompose the news on the daily articles in the Washington Post or NYTimes, etc.
6. Facebook Connect – an untapped potential that will give Facebook a whole new dynamism and level of interconnection. Facebook aspires to be a technology to connect with things that people use wherever they are. Facebook Connect permits users to connect with whatever they want. There are now 60 million users using Facebook Connect on partner websites and 80k sites have embedded FB Connect into their interface. There are now 300 FB Connect applications that have more than 1 million people using them every month. Ethan Beard (Director, Facebook Developer Network) spoke of the example of the 2nd match between France and Ireland (of hand of Henry-not-the-king fame) where, via Facebook Connect live streaming, TF1 was able to reach 2.6 million people on Facebook. FB Connect is easy to use (and apparently simple to programme). What I like about FB Connect is that it interlinks your chosen content specifically to your own personal network, which is clearly the future of our internet experience: social search.
Please don’t be shy and share your thoughts!
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