The Social

NEW YORK--You had two options if you wanted to hang out with Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Web 2.0 Expo conference this week: head over to the lobby bar of the trendy Standard Hotel on Monday night, where Digg was picking up the tab for several dozen of the city's blogger elite; or pack into Manhattan Center Studios on Tuesday night along with about a thousand other young, predominantly male New Yorkers for a live taping of Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht's "Diggnation" video show.

Geek heroes: Jay Adelson (left) and Kevin Rose in a screenshot from one of their regular 'Digg Dialogg' videocasts with Digg users.

Those are, after all, the two Diggs. There's Digg the company, the name that first put "social news" into the mouths of New York media both old and new, the BusinessWeek cover story that established the shaggy-haired Rose as digital media's poster boy, the start-up that was once talked about as a huge acquisition target for the likes of Current Media, News Corp., and even Google amid CEO Jay Adelson's coy insistence that it wasn't for sale. But then there's Digg the brand: haven for the wackiest of the Web, with a front page dominated by anything Apple, oddball science, insidery tech and politics news, and the latest YouTube sensations. It's a dual identity that seems to be tough for the industry, or the five-year-old company itself, to reconcile.

At the Web 2.0 Expo, both Diggs--and the tension between them--was on full display in a dual keynote by Adelson and Rose on Tuesday afternoon. And the executives were both vocal about the fact that Digg has got to change.

"We're about 40 million users today, (with) about 20,000 submissions a day going into the Digg system," Adelson said onstage. "It's certainly achieved huge things for us. It's what we've set out to do, but we have a ways to go."

Rose added, "We've pretty much stayed the same over the last couple years."

There's a revamped Digg coming, a complete overhaul using the Cassandra database management system, which was developed and then released as open source by Facebook. In the new version will be "instant Digging" that doesn't require registration or a login, better filtration of topics to fit any number of niche interests, and a "smarter" way to gauge story popularity so that both the number of "diggs" and the number of times a link was submitted in the first place are taken into account.

Adelson told CNET later on Tuesday, just outside the auditorium where hundreds of rowdy young Diggers were awaiting Rose and Albrecht to walk onstage for the live Diggnation taping (a co-production of Revision3, the video outlet that Rose and Adelson also co-founded), that this will arrive in the first half of next year. "I can't say with certainty when, because there are so many infrastructure components that have to come first," he said.

This talk of change and versatility is exactly the message that the San Francisco-based Adelson and Rose want to convey while they're visiting New York, the center of the global publishing industry. This is Digg the media company on parade, the Digg that picked up the tab for the cocktail-swilling media insiders at the Standard on Monday night; and this is the Digg that's taken a bit of a beating recently. True, its traffic isn't plummeting, and by most measures continues to grow at a decent pace, but as a news-sharing destination it's been eclipsed by both Facebook and Twitter.

Digg's once-gossiped-about valuation may have taken a hit simply because the market for social news has grown so saturated, and as a result the company is no longer a novelty. Take third-party Twitter app TweetMeme, for example, which takes the links shared all over Twitter in "retweets," and compiles them into something that looks an awful lot like Digg. Or the likes of Yahoo Buzz, which haven't proven to be as popular or ubiquitous as Digg but which proved that it's not particularly difficult to build your own social news service.

"It makes me very proud," Jay Adelson said of the Digg influence evident in TweetMeme buttons and, now, Facebook sharing buttons. He added, "I think that the sophisticated publisher understands the difference between sharing within a social network, sharing on Twitter, and sharing on Digg."

Influential, sure. But when it comes to making a lasting footprint in the media world, Digg hasn't yet been able to get past the common wisdom that the footprint in question will be from a beer-soaked Converse All-Star. And that's the Digg that was showcased on Tuesday night as Rose and Albrecht, both in trendy fitted plaid shirts, received a rock-star welcome for Diggnation.

More than a thousand people had showed up at the Manhattan Center Studios venue, a smaller crowd than the show's last taping in New York, but a company rep pointed out that the previous taping had been in the summer, and this one was on a school night. Someone in the audience excitedly waved a sign that said "WINDOWS 7 FTW!" (That's "for the win," in case you stepped in late.) Another sign read "I SKIPPED CLASS FOR THIS!" and still another, which Rose and Albrecht seemed especially proud of, was a green sign that read "GO HIPPIE!" with a massive, hand-drawn marijuana leaf.

Adelson says that the company's merry band of fanboys--yes, most of them are male--doesn't get in the way, strategy- or image-wise.

"Our core Digg enthusiasts frankly provide a tremendous amount of our feature ideas and feedback, and are the ones that we can count on to be there even when we screw up," Adelson told CNET on Tuesday night. "I don't think they hold us back. I think that's the power of the product."

Kevin Rose's essential Diggnation props: Mac laptop, open bottle of beer

(Credit: Revision3)

There have been some good signs. Adelson says that Digg's experimental advertising system, in which unpopular ads are penalized with higher costs ("We charge the advertisers more money when their ads start sucking," Rose explained in the Web 2.0 Expo keynote) have been a runaway success. The company also absorbed a Rose side project, Twitter directory WeFollow, which could have interesting implications.

Their mission is still precarious. The hordes of Digg loyalists propelled the company to fame, but they're known to be volatile: if they hate something, they'll make it obvious. In 2007, when Digg pulled down a number of news links in response to a cease-and-desist complaint (the links directed to instructions for cracking a digital rights management code in the now-defunct HD DVD format), avid users flooded its system with even more links to the code. Digg admitted defeat, and restored the censored links. Earlier this year, when a new URL-shortening feature called the DiggBar garnered a negative reaction, the company made some significant modifications. If they don't like the yet-to-be-unveiled Digg revamp, it could get really ugly.

But perhaps the most difficult part of Digg's dual-identity wrangling is the fact that the company's executives and figureheads really do seem to have an affinity for its mischievous roots. Take Tuesday night, when a few excited audience members at the Diggnation taping started waving around the pink tickets they'd received from local cops for downing booze while waiting in line outside to see the show.

"Open container in line? That is awesome!" Rose exclaimed, reaching for one of the tickets and displaying it in front of the crowd.

Co-host Alex Albrecht chimed in. "You should get that framed!"

NEW YORK--Web pioneer and conference honcho Tim O'Reilly warned the audience at the Web 2.0 Expo here on Tuesday afternoon that he thinks "we're headed into another ugly time." Namely, everybody is just being really nasty to each other. And it makes his hippie soul hurt.

For example, Rupert "Dr. Evil" Murdoch keeps threatening to pull News Corp.'s pay wall-guarded content from Google, perhaps offering an exclusive deal to another search engine for one hundred billion dollars (give or take a few bucks).

Those ubiquitous URL-shortening toolbars are throwing Web addresses behind a cloak of invisibility, O'Reilly said, and they "don't let you navigate freely like the Web used to work." With Google's Chrome hurling itself into the mix, the browser and operating-system wars are starting to look less "Mean Girls" and more "Aliens vs. Predator."

But O'Reilly's attitude isn't "bring it on, and get me a large popcorn with extra butter, while you're at it." Rather, he hinted that at least in some cases, he's willing to embrace Google as a big, cuddly, benevolent dictator in the midst of it all. It's "a monopoly that's a service of value to users," he said, adding that generally, when Google makes a product with the primary goal of one-upping the competition--Knol vs. Wikipedia, Checkout vs. PayPal--it's not a success.

That's probably because, at least right now, among all the giant robots stomping about the series of tubes, Google is the one that most resembles O'Reilly's vision of the "open Web." In a blog post prior to his speech, he predicted that Microsoft could take over this role. Or not. Either way, he insisted that "it's time for developers to take a stand."

Setting off this kind of electric shock in the Web's punditocracy is a great way to drum up attention and newsworthiness that doesn't have anything to do with philosophizing about the recession, extolling the possibilities of the real-time streaming Web, or predicting which dot-com figurehead is going to be the most plastered at South by Southwest this year. Thank goodness! That stuff was getting so boring!

And O'Reilly's rallying cry has already gathered reactions. Barbarian Group executive Rick Webb, for one, posted a colorful retaliatory blog post, in which he said that "setting aside the 'boo hoo, the Internet is becoming a bunch of walled gardens' arguments, when rational people have conversations about how to make the Web actually usable and not 95 percent piracy, spam, and fraud, almost every discussion starts with the proposition that there is no other realistic option but to chuck the whole thing and start over."

Of course, the Web should be in a state of "war." When have things been any different? It's a hub of innovation, competition, and constant change, and I think we all knew that already. The barrier to entry is low enough so that if there's a glaring problem with something, users will flock to whoever can create a better alternative. In fact, O'Reilly brought that up on Tuesday, when he talked about expensive in-car GPS navigation systems.

"The turn-by-turn directions from TeleAtlas cost $99 [on the iPhone], but Google is giving it away for free. This is a natural kind of extension for Google. I don't think Google is being evil here by being disruptive," O'Reilly said. "That's a massive user win, even though it is incredibly damaging to some existing companies and some existing business models. When Google offers free speech recognition, [that would be] an amazing win."

Is that legitimate innovation? Yes. But let's hope the "win" doesn't stop there. If Google manages to throw a sucker punch to Apple, Microsoft, or whoever else by offering something once-pricey for free, I should hope that the rest of the industry makes sure that it doesn't grow too complacent.

So let's get this straight: monopolies are bad, unless they're "nice" ones on behalf of companies that extol the virtues of Razor scooters, wheatgrass smoothies, and lava lamps. Competition is great, as long as everybody's nice to each other.

Doesn't quite make sense to me. But, hey, it's his show.

Where are the crowds? The Moscone Center was noticeably quieter this year at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Evan Bartlett)

SAN FRANCISCO--Stepping off an otherwise quiet street and through the door of the downtown restaurant Roe on Thursday night was, at first, like a foray into a secret fantasy world where no market crash or economic recession had ever happened.

It was the launch party for Yola.com, a rebranded Web publishing platform formerly known as SynthaSite, in conjunction with this week's Web 2.0 Expo down the street at the Moscone convention center. There was an open bar, of course: The signature cocktail was a kir royale, a blend of champagne and blackcurrant liqueur, so champagne flutes were the drinkware of choice in the darkened room. The music was loud. Yola's logo was everywhere--projected on the wall, on T-shirts handed out at the door, on stickers scattered across the bar for the taking.

Yet if you surveyed the scene, there were signs of conscious frugality. The guest list was tight and the party was kept small, with only the ground floor of the two-story Roe booked; the open bar eventually ended, and the kir royales stopped flowing. While Yola was a "silver" sponsor of the conference, the event had not been heavily publicized. The same applied to many of the other scattered parties at the convention. If you knew the details, you could slip into a fun and relatively low-key affair that might even have free drinks and snacks. It was all about doing a bit of digging.

With a "doing more with less" theme, change was in the air at the whole Web 2.0 Expo: This edition of the biannual confab, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb, felt like the recession had scooped a hole out of it with a spork. Attendance rates were slightly down, and even though conference representatives said more than 8,000 people came, the halls of The Moscone Center were noticeably quieter than in years past. Yet this is still a must-attend for the majority of the industry. Exhibitors from big tech companies like Microsoft and Adobe, courting developer talent to populate their various platforms and services, said that this is the best way to reach the biggest audience.

And here's what that audience was hearing: that with the harrowing financial climate, there is opportunity in casting off centuries' worth of old institutions that now only serve to hamper innovation.

"The current global financial crisis is the Web's fault," author Douglas Rushkoff said in his Wednesday keynote. "It's a good thing, and...it's really the arresting of a 400- to 500-year process from which value has been extracted from people and companies unfairly and unproductively."

"Six hundred thousand jobs were lost last month, and we've got to believe that the Internet has something to do with the massive restructuring, reorganization, and revitalization of what is our future," Meetup founder Scott Heiferman said in a talk on Friday morning. "They say that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, so there is this opportunity for us to turn our backs to the screen, to turn our backs to a centralized 20th-century culture where we are dependent on these bloated banks and insurance companies."

That's so last century
The irony lies in the fact that with so many talks at the expo fixed on the opportunities presented by financial difficulties, and the final death knells of the 20th-century way of doing things, the convention itself was still an old-school trade show. The expo floor was full (though not as full as last year) of colorful booths and talkative PR representatives, the panel lineup still packed with the usual marketing and programming buzzwords--ROI, SEO, PHP, RSS--and the art of the business card swap still paramount.

"There's just not a whole lot that's cool this year," one disappointed attendee told me. Another said he'd found that after last month's South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, there was something stale about the Web 2.0 Expo, even though it was much healthier than many had anticipated. Maybe it's time for a reboot.

You see, if you got past the surface, did a little digging--just like with the after-hours scene--there were some noteworthy talks at Web 2.0 Expo. There was a seminar about just how much you need to know about wine in order to impress business associates, a crash course from Digg's director of business development for old-media types who want to capitalize on the social news craze, and a session about marketing insights from the creator of the Burger King "Whopper Sacrifice" Facebook app. Keynote speakers like John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, and the founders of indie T-shirt sensation Threadless, weren't exactly the sorts of conference highlights you'd expect.

In those talks, the lack of banter about monetization and user engagement was refreshing. The T-shirt clad Threadless guys, for example, didn't really seem to be in their element sitting on couches onstage for a keynote "conversation" in front of an auditorium of laptop-wielding conference-goers in uncomfortable chairs. They were 21st century dot-com heroes in a setting that some of the expo's out-with-the-old speakers would likely have characterized as so last century.

One of the biggest and most promising highlights of the conference was the after-hours Ignite offshoot, the latest in a series of wacky geek-culture seminars presented by O'Reilly and spearheaded by Web 2.0 organizer Brady Forrest. Seven hundred people packed into a nearby nightclub for a set of decidedly unorthodox presentations: a mandated number of PowerPoint slides, set on an automatic timer, so that no one could veer off topic or go over time. Ignite events are held all over the world and have quite a cult following; with presentations like "Mr. Hacker Goes To Washington" and "Demystifying Weird Japanese Toys and Tools," it wasn't your typical Web 2.0 Expo material.

Conference representatives seem to think that the conference format still has life in it. "The expo itself is not going to change. I think the content changes from year to year based on what the trends are like and what the market looks like," TechWeb community manager Janetti Chon told CNET News. "We try to be the conference that appeals to all Web enthusiasts...of course the conference will evolve as the market and industry evolve." She does have a point. Web 2.0 Expo is so big and far-reaching that putting any kind of new spin on it would risk alienating some sector of attendees.

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, said in his address to the expo on Wednesday that the term "Web 2.0" was "never intended to be a version number." But maybe it should've been. With all this talk, finally, about putting old institutions to rest, maybe the digerati should consider taking the plunge and making our industry gatherings something truly new. If we're going to talk about a fresh start, there are a lot of things that can be done to make our events reflect it.

From what it sounds like, many of us are ready for it.

SAN FRANCISCO--"I don't know how many of you actually got sacrificed out there, but condolences to you," said Matt Walsh, head of the Interaction Design department at ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, as he surveyed the audience at his Friday morning talk at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Burger King)

CP&B, after all, was the creator of the "Whopper Sacrifice" phenomenon, a Burger King ad campaign on Facebook that promised a coupon for a free hamburger if participants deleted 10 people from their friends lists on the social network. It was a wild success: the Facebook application was installed nearly 60,000 times in a matter of days, nearly 20,000 Whopper coupons were sent out, and well over 200,000 Facebook friends were deleted. Facebook members even created unofficial groups, offering to let other members add them as friends and then delete them for Whopper Sacrifice purposes.

But Facebook disabled the campaign after ten days, claiming that it was a violation of user privacy because Whopper Sacrifice notified friends if they had been deleted. "(It) challenged the very concept of Facebook," Walsh said. "Whopper Sacrifice had been sacrificed." In an ironic twist, that just led to even more buzz for the campaign.

Walsh took the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo to talk about what he saw as the secret sauce (ha, ha!) behind Whopper Sacrifice's success: what he calls "deceptive simplicity."

"It's a very, very simple idea," Walsh said. "And it's something that to a user is a very easy message to communicate. Sacrifice ten of your friends, get a free Whopper. It's got kind of the ultimate elevator pitch."

But the decision-making process behind the campaign was more theoretical, almost anthropological. Walsh said that another core element of Whopper Sacrifice's popularity was the fact that it tapped into a real "tension" in digital culture--how social networking has changed our ideas of what friendship means.

"For so long, friendship in the social space has kind of been a form of social currency," Walsh explained. Social networks' "entire system is kind of dependent on you aggregating as many of your friends as possible in the network, ballooning as quickly as possible, but at the end of the day that's all fine and good in the ramp-up when everything is novel...quite a few years into the social-networking arena now, there's really a question of what is friendship in the 2.0 world?"

Combining that provocativeness with a simple, no-brainer campaign is what Walsh said made it work.

"You're going to be faced with a lot of questions, and you're going to be faced with a lot of what-ifs, and you're going to be faced with a lot of bells and whistles added on," he suggested to marketers in the audience. "Whopper Sacrifice was one that went viral with pretty much zero media budget. We had a few small media banners on Facebook itself, but outside of that...we had a press release and that was it. It blew up because it was something that really resonated with people."

He also acknowledged that not all the feedback was glowing.

"Some people thought it was a little brutal because we did send notifications," Walsh admitted. "If I defriended you, you would get a message saying that you were worth less than one-tenth of a Whopper."

Will Wright, creator of the Sim City and Sims franchises, is interviewed by John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Are video games really all about feeding your ego? Maybe, suggested legendary game designer Will Wright in a keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Expo on Thursday morning.

"Most people are very narcissistic," said Electronic Arts' Wright, creator of the Sim City and Sims franchises and now last year's avant-garde Spore, onstage with Federated Media's John Battelle. "The more you can make the game about that person, the more interested, the more emotionally involved they will get."

Advancements in technology have made it possible for the customization craze of the social-networking world to permeate the console and PC gaming sectors, and that has begun to open up the industry to new users who didn't see the appeal in hardcore gaming or immersive role-playing virtual universes.

He suggested that virtual world Second Life was on the right track by making it possible for members to create elaborate in-game items, but they were too difficult for most members to partake in. "The sophistication...was pretty high," Wright said. "For a lot of people, programming does not sound like entertainment."

Even though games--especially role-playing games--have a reputation for being a lonely form of escapism, Wright suggested that mainstream appeal can be found in, well, getting to be yourself. And that's where it gets back to the narcissism.

"The more this game can be about me, and my real life, and my real experiences and where I live, and my real friends (can mean more than) 'I'm going to go to the game and become an orc and get a real sword'," he suggested. Granted, Spore is all about building and growing strange creatures in a bizarre, science fiction universe. But there's a lot more out there, he said, as we're seeing a "Cambrian explosion" of ways to play and interact.

"The Wii, to me, represents the idea of non-immersive gaming," he said. "When you think about the Wii...most of the entertainment is not happening on the screen, it's about watching your friend act like a doofus swinging the thing around and maybe throw it into the TV set."

So maybe gaming can temper that ego, too.

Douglas Rushkoff at Web 2.0 Expo 2009

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--A conference about Silicon Valley innovation invariably will feature at least one talk about how the old order of American business is hopelessly broken and needs a tech-savvy recharge. At this year's Web 2.0 Expo here, it was author Douglas Rushkoff's "How the Web Ate The Economy, And Why This Is Good For Everyone."

It was a tantalizing title. But most of Rushkoff's talk wasn't about the Web or how it can help steer the world out of a global financial crisis. He focused instead on how the idea of "currency" as we know it, not to mention the notion of the "corporation," is profoundly archaic and that with the market meltdown, we have a golden opportunity to get rid of them altogether.

"We can make pretty much everything great," said Rushkoff, whose book "Life Inc." is coming out in early June, "and if we don't, they will recover and make us miserable for another few centuries."

Corporations and monetary systems, he said, are vestiges of the late Middle Ages when kings and aristocrats were struggling to exert some kind of authority over the fast-rising mercantile class and to rein in independent currencies before they became too powerful. "It was against the law to create value through one another. You had to do it through a corporation," Rushkoff explained. "That was what corporations were for. Centralized currency came up because most towns in late Middle Ages Europe had their own currencies...they had so much extra money they built cathedrals."

(Tip: if you want to make something sound really awful and backwards, talk about how it has roots in kings and feudalism.)

Tim O'Reilly speaks at Web 2.0 Expo 2009

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--The floor of the exposition hall at this year's Web 2.0 Expo has been a little bit lethargic, to say the least. "It's a lot emptier than last year," said one representative from a social gaming company that had set up a booth. "I think the 'Web 2.0' thing has become a bit of a stigma."

Indeed, these days the term goes hand-in-hand with broken business models and overblown expectations, as much as it does with innovation. With the economy in shambles, attendance at the semiannual conference is down. The show floor is sparser and the speaker lineup less impressive than in years past, and attendees have had to hunt a little harder to find parties after hours.

But conference czar Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media (which co-organized the conference along with TechWeb), said that "Web 2.0" is more relevant than ever.

"Web 2.0 was never intended to be a version number," O'Reilly said in his keynote address on Wednesday afternoon. "It was really a reflection of what happened after the dot-com bust."

Now, he said, the Web is maturing and getting smarter. "The baby that we built with technology is growing up and starting to go to work," he said, mentioning examples like energy metering aggregator AMEE, the Google search application that predicted where the flu would hit next, and iPhone apps that derive search results from voice recognition.

At last spring's Web 2.0 Expo, the market crash was still months off, but the early signs were starting to creep in: venture funding was harder to come by, company launches were growing less frequent, and it was starting to become evident that some of the most-buzzed names in Silicon Valley hadn't produced solid business models yet. Then, O'Reilly's address exhorted the audience to push beyond the Web's trendiest hype machines and start thinking about how to change the world. But now that the rest of the world is searching for answers, he explained, it's time to put that thought to work.

"We thought because of the downturn, because all of us are faced with the idea that maybe those ideas of perpetual increase were going to be a problem, that we might have to do more with less," O'Reilly said. "Maybe there's actually power in less, and that's one of the lessons of the Web...In technology we have this wonderful power of less where we get more for the same amount, and I think we need to start thinking about how we apply Moore's Law to the world's problems."

This year, the power of technological innovation to reach far beyond the Web has already been justified in the election of Barack Obama, which used consumer-grade Web technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as powerful communication and organization tools: "The way that he used technology to transform politics, the way that he harnessed his audience to do something that was profoundly world-shaping," O'Reilly said on Wednesday. "History's on a different course because of somebody understanding how to apply technology more effectively in a new realm."

The most important part, he concluded, is that it's crucial to keep up that Silicon Valley attitude of positive change for the greater good as it brings its business principles to the rest of the world. Getting too self-serving was what ultimately caused the market collapse this fall, he said. The tech industry has its egos, too, and that's what got us all into trouble the last time around.

"There were a whole lot of people (in the finance industry) who said, 'Wow, I can get a lot for myself here, and the financial system is really a tale of how collective intelligence can go awry. Because, of course, our financial system is also networked collective intelligence and yet it was somehow hijacked by the spammers, the Ponzi schemers, and the people who thought, 'I want to get something for me.'"

"We know what happened," O'Reilly said, showing a slide of the now-famous Twitter outage graphic of a flock of birds attempting to lift a whale above water. "That's the fail whale."

There aren't many new companies launching at this year's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which runs Tuesday through Friday. One of the few that are is Lunch.com, which strives to get a little more juice out of user-generated publishing.

Here's the premise of Lunch: You can review anything you want, from a TV show to a restaurant to a food product to a household appliance. I guess it aims to be, sort of, a Wikipedia for opinions. Founder J.R. Johnson, who started building the site after he sold previous creations VirtualTourist.com and OneTime.com to Expedia, said that Lunch started filling up its private beta by reaching out to frequent Amazon reviewers and received a very positive response.

You're also encouraged to network with other members and filter reviews through its "Similarity Network" function, an algorithm for finding like-minded users and matching them to one another. To ramp up Lunch's assessment of your preferences, you can play "speed-rating" games called Exhilarate, which are structured much like Netflix's recommendation feature.

Quite honestly, I have a hard time seeing people turn to a general reviews site when there are already well-established sites for reviews of businesses, books, movies, and the lot--not to mention a plethora of "social shopping" sites for consumer products. I feel like Lunch could've gained a lot more traction if it had made its debut two or three years ago, when user-generated content was a lot more noteworthy. But maybe that's just me.

Facebook has partnered with Adobe Systems to make it easier for developers to bring its Flash technology to their social apps, the two companies have announced. Adobe has introduced a new ActionScript 3.0 client library to provide resources to developers who are using Flash on Facebook's developer platform and Facebook Connect product, and will be promoting the possibilities of integrating Flash with Facebook's API on its Web site.

"There just weren't a lot of great tools that officially helped developers put these platforms together," Facebook senior platform manager Josh Elman told CNET News. While unofficial Flash libraries have been amassed by Facebook developers before, this is "an officially supported library that we're both endorsing that Adobe, who are really the experts in Flash development, could provide better samples and documentation to their developer site," he said.

Flash is already a huge presence on Facebook's platform, particularly on the gaming side, Elman said--12 of its top 20 applications use the technology. And at big app development companies like RockYou or Zynga, working Flash into the platform was not much of a problem given the volume of engineering talent. The new library, which is free and open-source, is aimed particularly at independent developers whose limited expertise or resources may have made integrating code from Facebook and Flash more challenging.

"This is going to be just a much easier get-started toolkit," Elman said.

The announcement comes hot on the heels of rival social network MySpace's partnership with Microsoft to bring its Silverlight technology--a Flash rival--to its developer platform. Microsoft, ironically, has invested $240 million in Facebook. When asked if a similar Silverlight partnership would be coming to Facebook, Elman's comment was that Facebook is "constantly talking to Microsoft about a variety of things."

Both partnerships were timed to launch at this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which runs Tuesday through Friday.