Inside Facebook

This morning at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco I moderated the Comparing Social Platforms panel, which was comprised of awesome folks speaking on behalf of the top social platforms on the web today:

• Allen Hurff, SVP of Engineering at MySpace
• Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook
• Jessica Alter, Director of Platform and Business Development at Bebo
• Patrick Chanezon, OpenSocial Evangelist at Google
• David Recordon, Open Platform Lead at Six Apart

While the panel covered a variety topics that each merit more discussion (there are entire conferences devoted to doing just that), this morning the panel discussed key issues for the social platform economy - such as each platform’s philosophy on key product integration points (profile, feeds, viral channels), aligning user and developer interests (engagement, marketing channels), monetization roadmap (ad networks, commerce), data portability, and potential business conflicts (in verticals like photos and music).

Since I was moderating the panel, I didn’t have time to take notes, but here are some paraphrases of some noteworthy panelist comments:

• Jessica Alter: We’re going to be driving developers to focus more and more on engagement. While I don’t have any specific announcements today, things like time spent and page views are going to become more important on the platform.
• Allen Hurff: On the question of verticals like music, of course MySpace is going to continue to work with major music distribution partners around the world. But we really want to remain as agnostic as possible. In fact, I expect there to be many more app feed items than MySpace system feed items.
• Dave Morin: We’re spending a lot of our time right now thinking about data portability, or perhaps it would better be called “privacy portability.” You should have the option to have your privacy settings follow you around the web.
• David Recordon: The term “data portability” almost can’t be used in that way any more, since the branding of the term now means something else.
• Patrick Chanezon: Unlike most of these social platforms, iGoogle is much more of a social content discovery service than social network. It’s a pretty different type of service that’s built on OpenSocial that we think is really interesting.
• Allen Hurff: The MySpace Platform actually represents a pretty big shift just in the last year from the way MySpace has traditionally viewed opening up its data. We’re going to push this even further in 2008.
• Dave Morin: Creating a platform is like creating a marketplace. You have your arbitrageurs, and we have those, you have your hedge funds, they’re like the guys staying up all night finding ways to tweak their way into the viral channels more.
• Patrick Chanezon: OpenSocial is really just an overlap of the most common set of services needed to run social applications. We may begin to see platforms on top of platforms in the coming year.

Despite the early start time (8:30!), by midway through the panel there were folks crowding in the back of the room. We only had time for a couple audience questions before we had to make room for the next panel. Thanks to everyone for a great discussion! For more, check out GSP East.

Update: Here’s a video of the panel, thanks to Simon Chen: