A whole bunch of Big Name companies on stage, all claiming to be platforms. Mr Techcrunch in the chair...
Mike Arrington kicked off by pushing Mike Jones from MySpace hard on the relative failure of MySpace's identity standard, and asked if oAuth and Facebook Connect were the winners. Jones pushed back with the idea that it would be damaging to have only one identity standard (but that skirts around the oAuth issue...) and Kevin Eyres of LinkedIn pointed out that people might want to split personal and professional identities and graphs - and LinkedIn has its own APIs right now.
Cristian Cussen of Ning took a different angle to the social graph. Facebook and LinkedIn are about existing relationships, he suggests, but Ning facilitates the creation of new relationship - communicating around common topics of interest. They're stepping back a little from Friending as the core of activity of the site.
David Jacobs of Six Apart argued that treating developers well is important, because it allows you to get traction for your platform. But Ethan Beard of Facebook says that user experience has to come before developers. And developers will come up with problems before they come up with great things. Managing a platform is challenging, but it's no use having happy developers and no users...
Is OpenSocial dead? Ning builds its apps on OpenSocial. Six Apart continues to integrate with it, but it lacks a killer app, suggests David Jacobs. MySpace using it - and it remains a useful way of building applications. People aren't hearing about it because it's just not controversial, suggests Jones.
So... what is a platform? A place to build applications? An identity service? A way of finding your friends?
There seems to be a debate about how much information should be carried off the originating sites using these platforms.
I look unhappy there, but I had a good time on this panel. Hopefully we'll get to catch up while I'm out here...
Thanks,
David
Catch up we did. It was a pleasure to meet you. :-)