The Social

Slide founder Max Levchin talks with Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li at Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--Max Levchin made a name for himself as the co-founder of transaction system PayPal, one of the Web's foremost utilitarian services. Then he made a name for himself again at the helm of Slide, which isn't exactly in the same space. Its flagship product, "SuperPoke," has become the poster child--er, poster sheep--for criticism of social-networking developer applications as a silly fad.

On Wednesday, after his keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I asked Levchin if he thought there were actually a chance for some social applications to emerge that are useful rather than goofy.

"There's definitely opportunity to build utilitarian, or pure utility, apps on Facebook," he said. So I asked him to give an example.

"Alcoholics Anonymous," Levchin said, without hesitation. "If you're trying to recover as an alcoholic, there's no easy way for you to join an anonymous group on Facebook. So creating an anonymous group type on Facebook for something that people have to get off their chest but don't really want to reveal their identity (in doing so)...it's pretty utilitarian. Grim, but utilitarian." Currently, Facebook's API doesn't permit developers to anonymize the social-networking experience.

I expressed my surprise with how little time it took Levchin to up with that kind of idea. He shrugged. "Maybe it's because I grew up in Russia."

SAN FRANCISCO--"It turns out that the Internet has worked pretty well," industry mainstay Marc Andreessen told an audience at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday morning.

Andreessen's keynote interview with Federated Media chief John Battelle was somewhat of a history lesson into the distant past of the Web (you know, 15 years ago) followed by the requisite speculation about an uncertain future.

Marc Andreessen looks back and ahead at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET Networks)

"It was a very confusing time," Andreessen said of the Net's early days. In the early days of Mosaic, the browser created by Andreessen that eventually evolved into Netscape and then Mozilla and then Firefox, "the conventional wisdom in the business world and in large parts of the press was that interactive television was going to be the future...the Internet, really, at the time, and the Web and Mosaic were really sort of renegade academic research projects."

But Andreessen's current project, Ning, couldn't be less renegade. The slick dot-com, which taps into the social-media craze by letting members build their own social networks without requiring technical expertise, has been fueled not only by Andreessen's Valley cred but also by a sky-high valuation and a recent $60 million funding round that the exec famously said was for an economic "nuclear winter."

"I have no idea what's really going to happen," Andreessen said when Battelle asked him about the "nuclear" comment. "There's this huge irony for our industry...we got blamed for a lot of the last crash. We are the most remote uncorrelated part to this crash that's happening because tech may have lots of issues but we tend to not have a lot of debt and this is all about debt and credit.

Regardless, Andreesen seems to think his own company's well-prepared. He proudly touted some Ning statistics: more than 250,000 individual social networks have been created, 75 percent of which are active. Page views are going up 10 percent week over week; a million new members are joining every month; and 1,500 networks are created every day.

But Ning, like Battelle's Federated Media, could take a big advertising hit in a recession. Once again, Andreessen reminded Battelle and the audience that things tend to be unpredictable. Back in the early days, he said, "everybody told us there was no way to make money on the Internet."

Battelle made sure he touched upon a particularly touchy subject for Andreessen: Microsoft. Gates & Co. famously dealt a fatal blow to Andreessen's Netscape Navigator browser in 1995 when it released Internet Explorer. Anyone hoping for nastiness would've been disappointed, though, as Andreessen's take on Microsoft was quite friendly. "It's hard to even conceive what this industry would be like if Microsoft hadn't standardized the operating system," he said.

"Our view was, we adapt," Andreessen said when asked if he'd freaked out over the debut of Explorer. "The browser turned into Mozilla, which turned into Firefox, which has been a huge success."

Andreessen also addressed Microsoft's ongoing desire to acquire Yahoo. "If the deal goes through I think it will actually be a really good deal. I think they'll get a lot out of it," he said.

But he added that he'd be a bit sad for Yahoo. "It's always a little bit sad, the prospect of an entrepreneurial company, especially one that's had that kind of success over the years, not being independent. But over time these things are part of the natural evolution."

The media business hasn't figured out that direction yet, in his view. "Most of the major media companies are still largely unprepared for the shift, which is ironic considering how long the stuff has been around. If you look at newspapers right now they're just in absolute freefall from a business standpoint."

He kept talking about evolution. But somewhat paradoxically, he repeatedly emphasized that nobody can really tell where it's going. "We're 15 years into it, and yet things are still developing, and a lot of things are still unknown."

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li interviews Max Levchin at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

SAN FRANCISCO--In his keynote address Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Expo here, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin said his current company, social-network application developer Slide, will prevent social sites from becoming fads.

Pretty ambitious for a start-up that made a name for itself by letting you throw virtual sheep at your friends on Facebook. (That'd be SuperPoke, a delightfully pointless Slide application.)

Levchin, interviewed onstage by Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li, was recently crowned Web 2.0's poster boy--as bestowed upon him by Portfolio magazine, which put him on the cover with the caption "Brilliant!" and a giant lightbulb seemingly balanced on his forehead.

"It's incredibly embarrassing and also 'pressure-full' and all sorts of other emotional things which I'm not all that good at expressing," Levchin said of the experience. "One, to be on a cover, and two, to be a 'poster boy.'" Plus, a $50 million funding round in January valued Slide at half a billion dollars.

Those are some pretty valuable sheep.

Early on, Li asked Levchin how exactly Slide makes money. Like so many other Web 2.0 execs, Levchin answered that he believes in advertising. He has it easier than most of his dot-com brethren: Slide has the good fortune of having enough active users and advertising connections, not to mention Levchin's star power, to score top-shelf advertisers. Neither Levchin nor Li touched upon anything involving the shaky economy and a potential downturn in online ads.

Li did ask whether Levchin is concerned about running a company that's wholly dependent upon the existence and popularity of other platforms--Facebook, MySpace, and the like. A big social network is perfectly capable of creating SuperPoke equivalents in-house, throwing a potentially fatal sheep at the company.

Levchin drew an analogy to Adobe's software, which is wholly reliant upon operating systems like Microsoft Windows. There were plenty of opportunities for Microsoft to put Adobe out of business in the past, he said, and Microsoft ultimately realized that it was in its best interest to keep Photoshop and Acrobat around. "I sleep relatively well at night about my competition, or the lack thereof," Levchin said.

The sheep, according to Levchin, can weather the storm.

The interview didn't raise any points that Valley junkies didn't know already. Application spam, he said, is an "intellectually challenging" issue that he hopes to solve "the same way (e-mail) spam gets dealt with today." And lightbulbs aside, Levchin maintained an air of humility, reminding the audience that his first four companies failed but that his fifth was "pretty successful." He was, of course, referring to PayPal, which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

He added that one of the ways he measures success is "the number of people that make a million dollars or more in your employee roster when your company has an exit."

So what makes Slide so special? It's that people actually use it, Levchin said. SuperPoke might be silly, but user engagement rates are through the roof. Procrastination-happy users of Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks for which Slide has created applications still haven't gotten sick of them. For a promotional tie-in sponsored by last year's hit movie Juno, a "pregnancy test" option was added to the SuperPoke roster--370,000 virtual pregnancy tests were administered in the first day of the campaign.

So what keeps him going? Levchin said he isn't really sure. "People are driven to do stuff. Jackson Pollack was driven to splash paint on canvases," he said.

Max Levchin, it seems, is currently driven to enable the world to hurl virtual sheep, Easter eggs, groundhogs, and meat pies (that was a Sweeney Todd tie-in) at their social-networking contacts. And thus far, he's been quite the success.

Enough for a magazine cover with a lightbulb above his head, even.

So many big names, so little excitement.

(Credit: Andrew Mager)

SAN FRANCISCO--Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith had quite an opportunity on his hands. He was moderating a panel called "Comparing Social Platforms," featuring five representatives of some of the biggest players on the social Web: Dave Morin of Facebook, Allen Hurff of MySpace, Jessica Alter of Bebo, Patrick Chanezon of Google, and David Recordon of Six Apart. Smith had the chance to be a digital devil's advocate and get a lively debate going.

Why won't Facebook sign on to the OpenSocial standard that Google kick-started? Why hasn't MySpace's developer platform caught on as fast as execs had hoped? And how's it going with Bebo's have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too strategy of accepting both OpenSocial- and Facebook- compatible developer applications? On that note, how has Bebo's acquisition by AOL changed things? There were so many questions that could've been explored.

Unfortunately, the panel was sort of a yawn. Maybe that's because it was 8:30 a.m., and a number of the panelists had likely been out till the break of dawn at the wild party Digg threw the previous night. (A Web 2.0 maxim: When all else fails, blame fratty Digg founder Kevin Rose.) And the overall gist of the panel--"developer platforms are so new, so who knows where they'll go?"--didn't exactly provide a whole lot of answers to the curious audience.

"The social graph hasn't even been tapped yet," Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook, said. "We're literally, like, right in the beginning." That was pretty much the gist of the whole panel. Smith, too, brought up the novelty of it all: "A year ago, none of the platforms or products that we're talking about were even publicly available."

Chanezon, an OpenSocial API evangelist at Google, didn't exactly toss any punches at Facebook's Morin for not jumping on the OpenSocial bandwagon. In fact, he gave the social network a bit of praise for pioneering the idea of a developer platform. Once Facebook opened its doors to outside developers, everyone else wanted a piece of the action. "Social apps didn't exist before you guys. You just created the space."

A few interesting points were brought up. Alter talked about Bebo's current challenge of providing accurate metrics as to exactly which applications are drawing the most activity. Morin teased Facebook's upcoming payment system as a way to help developers make a buck or two. "Social commerce is likely the future of how e-commerce is done on the Web," he said, "so we're working on a commerce engine and enabling people to take payments on Facebook."

Smith briefly addressed MySpace's developer platform, asking Hurff, the News Corp.-owned site's director of engineering, why things had been "taking a bit slower" than expected. "We are taking it slow," Hurff answered as though it were a deliberate choice on MySpace's part. "I expect that to pick up...we haven't had anything bad happen."

Things briefly got exciting when Morin started mentioning Facebook's commitments to data portability--the ability to translate your identity from one social network to the next--and Six Apart's Recordon seemed to take issue. "Our intent is to enable the user to take their data with them anywhere they want to go...it's certainly our intent to enable a user to have access to whatever data they need," Morin explained. It seemed a little bit counterintuitive, considering Facebook's closed-off reputation. "Over the next year we're thinking a lot about how to do that both on Facebook and off of Facebook."

Recordon interjected,"You can't just go out and say we need data portability." Later in the panel, after I suggested via Twitter that he was implying that Facebook's commitment to data portability was all talk, he elaborated. "All of data portability is talk. People need to focus on doing something useful with open standards, and portability will come naturally."

Beyond that, the panel was mostly predictable. The panelists seemed to agree that the art of the developer platform is evolving, and will continue to evolve. Great. We knew that already. One prediction, however, struck a chord: "One of the things that I can see happening in the next year," Chanezon predicted, "(is that) application developers are going to start to open up their own APIs for other application developers to reuse." In other words, a platform on a platform.

That's trippy.

SAN FRANCISCO--Here at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of Wednesday morning's talks was to feature Blaine Cook, Twitter's lead architect, talking about the Jabber protocol and "building the real-time Web."

The problem: Reports had surfaced earlier that morning that Blaine Cook was leaving the company. Awkward.

Cook told several blog sites that he was indeed leaving, attributing it to the fact that he was moving to the U.K. But a source close to the snafu told CNET News.com that Cook had indeed been ousted from his role at the microblogging start-up in one capacity or another. In an e-mail to the Silicon Alley Insider, Cook called the departure "amicable," that he was out as of two weeks earlier, and that he would likely stay on as an adviser to the company.

After the panel, Cook told CNET News.com that there were "a number of factors" behind his departure, and that he would be relocating to the U.K. in the fall. In the meantime, he said, he was exploring a number of possibilities. He said he'll probably end up in a role within a U.K. company to avoid the hassle of a semi-regular across-the-pond commute. With regard to the fact that he took the stage at the conference just hours after the news broke that he was leaving the company, he said, "It's been kind of an insane morning."

Luckily for Cook, his talk at Web 2.0 wasn't directly about Twitter. It was also a lecture, not a panel, so there was no moderator to poke around the issue. And it was tech-heavy, with lines of code dominating the presentation screen, which meant that the folks showing up to listen were more interested in geekspeak than gossip.

Bloggers were eager to pounce on the news as a consequence of Twitter's notorious scaling problems, which Cook should have been able to keep under control. But many members of the developer community immediately came out in support of him: Google engineer Kevin Marks said (ironically on Twitter) that Cook "has real-world experience of hard scaling issues that is worth more than any bloviating theories."

And a member of the developer community told CNET News.com that Cook's skills were highly respected and that now that the news broke, he'd likely be inundated with job offers.