It is wonderful to be in the bay area... Just so many talented people and exciting new technologies.

Last night I attended SDForum Search SIG panel session. The discussions were wonderful and going pretty fast. It was difficult to take notes but, there were few key items that are interesting (to me).

Panelists:
Kevin Marks from Google (heading the Google social graph API effort)
Aditya Argarwal (Director of Engineering, Facebook)
Kent Brewster (Yahoo! Working on MyBlogLog API)
Eve Phillips (CEO of Chirp)

Lightweight Social Graph vs. Accurate Social Graph - This has to deal with rather a social graph is for causal sharing or  rather details/accurate information are shared.
Avoid Anti-Patten - This term anti-patten is new to me, but according to Wikipedia, a solution that initially seems to be solveing problem, but later found to be cause more issues.
Portability of a social graph - Can you move it easily? Even further, if someone decides to leave the network, can all data be erased.
Privacy - The key is no surprises to the users
Not knowing users want want is common - Initially, at the bootstrap phase of a social network it is not often clear what the users really want. Listen to the users.
Every social network has a bootstrap phase.

Kent Brewster showed a really cool demo, the latest MyBlogLog API, which allow blog visitors' social graph (mush up) data shown. You can try the demo here: http://kentbrewster.com/blogjuice/ (just click on the Blog Juice link and select some people from the popup window) According to Mr. Brewster, he had only 2 days to work on it, so expect beta experience

Even Phillips CEO of Chrip showed off her company's product: A social network/mash up screen saver. http://www.chrip.com
 
Yahoo Media team taped the session, and they told me that the video will be on either http://next.yahoo.net or http://developer.yahoo.com . I don't want when the video will be up, but as soon as I know I will an update.

 W. Seto