Jason Austin's Blog Life and times of a PHP Developer in Raleigh, NC

Futureweb2010 Day 2

Day 2 at Futureweb 2010 brought some interesting sessions and some less-than-interesting sessions as well.  Here's my wrap-up.

The opening keynote was from Danah Boyd, who is an expert at looking at analytics with respect to social media.  Her talk was jam packed with interesting information, but the part that spoke to me was the escalation of Facebook and what that has meant to privacy.  When Facebook started (and when I joined) it was limited to .edu email addresses, which meant that the users were entirely academic.  Academia has a much different level of trust with one another than the general public, and Facebook got a reputation early on as being a viable alternative to MySpace...MySpace without the kooks   As Facebook grew up, they got much looser with the data that they possess.  First with Beacon, then with Facebook connect, and most recently with Facebook Graph.  They have gone from trusted source, to a company that seems willing to distribute data about you to every single website that wants it.  During the talk, I posted this tweet:

Now I have always known the risks of giving my data to Facebook.  I'm not one of the people Danah talked about who don't know what the privacy policies are or just click though the alerts and not reading them.  I'm an informed user and I (think I) know what Facebook is doing with my info.  But there most recent moves to allow my friends to share data about me without my say so is frightening.  So much so, that I am considering removing my account totally.  We'll see how that goes...another blog post is probably forthcoming about that.

The other session that I found extremely interesting was one on entrepreneurship.  This is a topic that hits close to home for me, as I am working on my third startup right now.  There was so much awesome advice that came from this, but I'm going to focus on a few key points.  The first point, was that staying in the black and making money early will save you from mistakes and heartache later on.  This was in reference to seeking VC money for your startup.  It really does make a LOT of sense to me.  I mean, if your idea takes off and you aren't making any money, you could put yourself in a situation where you HAVE to have a million dollars+ of funding just to continue your work.  If you don't have that money, you have to essentially sell your company to VC funding groups to stay above water.  VC's usually want about 75-80% of your company, which before you know it, you have lost control of your company and are now subject to the whims of your financial backers.  Not a great move.  The other thing I heard in the talk was a quote..."The defining mark of an entrepreneur is that they are people who get things done".  Damn straight.  I couldn't have said it better myself, and it's about as true as it comes.

The other sessions for the day were lacking.  I went to an intellectual property discussion and a discussion on interactive design, neither of which spoke to me at all.  I felt as though the speakers were more interested in hearing themselves talk than conveying useful information.  I'm sure somebody somewhere got something out of it, but I thought they were unprepared and uninteresting.

I'll be back for the third and final day tomorrow.