Dopp Juice Archive

Just in time for SXSW, I am really excited to announce that Cerado (the firm I consult with) has launched a handy “Unofficial Pocket Guide” for SXSW. It’s a mobile-friendly widget based on the beta of Cerado Ventana, and it gives you quick access to:

– People (who are here)
– Agenda (of panels and parties)
– Books (that authors will be signing in the book lounge)
– FAQ (‘cuz we all get confused sometimes)

It looks killer on the iPhone, and other devices are reporting sexy UI as well.

For the People tab, we’ve built a self-reporting directory (instead of scraping the registration database for everybody’s information). Adding yourself is like adding a blog comment: enter info, click submit, see it immediately. No email addresses; just your name, photo, and URL.

If you’re here at SXSW and fancy yourself an Early Adopter, go ahead and add yourself to the People listing. Just click to the People tab, and hit the “+” button — that’s it. I’m a big fan of posting your blog or twitter stream URL, but you could also post your Facebook or LinkedIn or company website (or whatever) — however you want your SXSW peeps to keep tabs on you.

This is a clean and classy way to get some exposure and remind people that you’re worth checking out.

The homepage is here: http://sxsw.cerado.com

And you can jump directly to the “Add Yourself” form as well.

Takes two minutes. Tops.

Check it out. Here’s what it looks like:

However, when building this, we also realized that the whole world isn’t mobile. (Yet.) So, it’s also available as a widget that you can put on your blog. You can get that here.

I’m really excited about this project, and it’s already been a lifesaver for me in getting oriented to my week at SXSW. So check it out, see if it’s what you need this week, and grab the free publicity opportunity. People wanna know who you are.

Oh, and if you want to see any features added, just send me your wishlist. :)

Last night the newly-freewheeling Susan Mernit and I attended the SD Forums meeting on Using the Social Graph / Social Platforms to Enhance Search at the Yahoo campus. The panel included representatives from Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Chirp, and they grappled with questions about what the Internet is going to do with all of this information about who is connected with whom. Here are a few of my takeaway notes:

• When we search, we find things we were looking for. When we participate in social networks, we find things we didn’t know we were looking for.
• To subscribe to someone on Twitter is to use them as a media source.
• Our public content and our public statements about our social graph are a kind of performance. (Dopp Juice is a kind of performance.) This stuff needs to be treated differently than private conversations (messages, emails, IMs), which are meant to be off-stage.
• One-way connections (e.g., following someone on twitter) articulates what you’re interested in. Two-way connections (e.g., an email conversation) articulates who you’re interested in.
• Direct search has been nicely monetizable (see Google’s Massive Empire) because it involves a direct interest, but social search is the new frontier for monetization.
• Social networks SHOULD NOT ASK PEOPLE FOR THEIR GMAIL AND YAHOO MAIL LOGIN INFO. (i know, we’ve talked about this already, but it was nice to hear it on the panel from the Yahoo rep, too.) His reasons: our email address books include everyone we’ve ever emailed; not just the people we have valuable relationships with. The tactic is spam-producing and relationship-damaging.
• Facebook’s style of social networking sometimes creates lightweight friendships that obfuscate the value of networks. Knowing who my 20 best friends are is often more valuable than knowing who my 500 best friends are.
• There is an ongoing tension between privacy and portability. How do we keep our information safe, versus how do we carry our information with us?
• True portability involves both the ability to extract your information in a way that can be used elsewhere and the ability to delete it from the system so that it’s no longer in the first network’s hands.
• There can never ever be a privacy surprise. If the user sees you publicly displaying something that they thought was private, you just lost their trust in a very big way.
• There’s user-generated content and then there’s information about the user’s social graph. These are separate things. To do cool things for fun and profit on this next frontier of social media, you’re gonna want access to both.

So, you’re in a conversation with someone who’s clearly not noticing the confused look on your face. This person has gone off on a long-road tangent and is using words and acronyms that you’ve never heard before. What do you do?

Here are my suggestions (besides, you know, the obvious blank stare or “could you explain that?” responses):

1) The Brush-Off

Variations:

• “Nah, I’m not really a Star Wars geek.”
• “Sorry, I don’t speak Swedish.”

2) The Signal
Some friends and I have been trying to introduce the convention of throwing “star trek fingers” as a non-verbal signal that you need a definition. It’s less interruptive and more respectful. It just happens to be lacking a bit in widespread adoption, but I figure we can get past that… Try it sometime!