/The most interesting things that I heard in Stream 2007

The most interesting things that I heard in Stream 2007

I attended Stream 2007 last week in Athens. This is an unconference organized by WPP since this year. I organized one of the discussions (on measuring the blogosphere) in which we had a very interesting conversation about Technorati and other tools. I also went to other discussions on social networking. These are the most interesting remarks I could hear and my thoughts about Web 2.0 after attending this event:

  

– Advertising agencies and media are frightened by the Internet. They see new opportunities but also lots of challenges. They realize that their people are not really aware of what is going on.

– Social networks are really the new thing. Facebook, with its 10 bn $ valuation, was everywhere. For Americans, this is the first company that is challenging Google’s monopole. As a matter of fact, Google is launching a new network at the beginning of next year. Facebook could also become a Linkedin killer if its groups get really popular (I don’t agree so mucho on this, as in my opinion, Facebook is not so professional). Curiously, there is a social network in Korea, Cyworld, with 42% of the country’s population as a member.

– We need a social networking system free of companies. Social networks should belong to people and not to the companies that manage them. Many people think that today’s Facebook is like the old AOL, where you could only send e-mails to AOL addresses. In the future, Facebook will have to open its system, so that its users can be reached from other networks. As Marko Ahtisaari said, Facebook needs more competition. Steve Rubel has recently written about this. He thinks that portals (Google, Yahoo) will win the battle against Facebook because of their more open structure.

Twitter has disappeared. As a matter of fact, Facebook has a utility (status) which works as a small twitter.

– Web 2.0 is a men’s thing. Nevertheless, budgets are in the hands of women working for advertising agencies.

– Digital identity is one of the buzz words of the moment. People in advertising agencies are really interested on this. Probably because of the huge amount of data that Internet users are giving about them and which could be used to send them targeted ads.

– Aggregating contents is another concept that is growing very fast. Facebook is in itself and aggregator.

– Mobile social networks are already a reality in Korea. It is coming! At the same time, most of the mobiles will have a GPS by the end of 2008.

– Online classified ads are really hurting newspapers’ revenues. At least in the UK.