I know I am a little late on this post (since it is actually day 4 now), but better late than never. I sat in on a few good presentations / panels today, gleaned a few good nuggets here and there. The first one was Social Networking Winners and Losers, and it was given by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Gina Bianchini of Ning, Matt Cohler of Facebook and Mike Speiser of Yahoo. Gina outlined what makes a social network successful as: having great partners, create social norms, make the network personal, reach an area of human life and also to make it such that a user gains instant gratification from using your network. All pretty straightforward, but I think sometimes those that are developing social networks overlook a few of these. One other great point of the presentation was in order to make your network better, every time a user interacts with it, that interaction should be captured and used to make the next experience for the next user even better. If you take that to heart, then you will continue to build out a great product.

The next session I sat in on was Building Awesome Web Sites and Services Using the Power of Happy Users. This was a talent packed panel led by Ted Rheingold of Dogster and the panel was made up of Biz Stone, Stewart Butterfield and Josh Schachter. Ted gave several good examples of how you can leverage your users to make a good product from engaging them in beta testing to having them generate content to them helping define your product road map and market research. The big question is how do you know that your customers even want to be involved in these types of activities? The answer was if you build your product first and you are excited and very engaged with it, they will see that and in turn want to participate where they can. Making use of your user base to improve your product is a great tactic to implore to continuously better your product and in the same breath, keep them engaged with it based on what they want out of it.

The last panel I sat in on was the Power of P2P - Millions of Tiny Unstoppable Pieces. It was led by Ori Brafman, and the panel was made up of Noah Kagan, Premal Shah, Eric Marcoullier and Ed Kozel. It was an interesting look at how peer to peer affects all aspects of Web 2.0 from infrastructure to marketing to social networks. As it pertains to technology, Ed made the point that all of the social activity that is taking place today online will drive a certain degree of technology advancement. Peer to peer has had a tremendous impact on shaping the web to be what it is today and it will continue to play an important role in shaping it for the future.

That is it for the recap, I am heading down to our Mountain View office today for a demo. It should be pretty cool, and hopefully we will bring it to production in the near future.