At AlwaysOn Innovation Summit 2007

I’m at the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit at Stanford University. Spoke here the past two years, but this year I’m spending just the day here in the Bloggers Bullpen. No camera, though I brought a video camera for videotaping Sen. John McCain, who’ll appear at 4:30 pm PT today.

The usual gang is here: Dan Farber, Steve Gillmor, Denise Howell, Colette Vogele, Buzz Bruggeman, Jeremiah Owyang, Robert Scoble, Eric Rice, John Furrier, Renee Blodgett, Jeff Schwartz.

The conference is being webcast live, with archived videos later. Won’t be live-blogging everything, but here are a few nuggets:

Recommendation services

On the Beyond Search panel, Joe Greenstein, CEO of Flixster, said the recommendations of friends and of like-minded people go only so far. His site goes beyond the standard "If you liked this, you’ll like this …" paradigm by letting users post reviews and engage in conversations and arguments about what was cool or not. You have to introduce fun into the equation.

Paul Martino, CEO of Aggregate Knowledge — I met him at Gnomedex and at AlwaysOn two years ago when he was leaving Tribe.net for his new venture — said sites need to go beyond offering a small recommendation box in a corner of the page. "You need multiple windows, you need a place to write a review, a way to forward to friends so you engage the user in deeper ways. If all you have are purchase histories, you’ll have the problem that Amazon has" with the limitations of its recommendation technology.

Martino said one of the pioneers in the recommendation technology space recently told him, "Generation 1 of recommendation technology was all about the algorithm. Generation 2 was the user experience/user interaction. Generation 3 is all about the social realm. Combining all three — that’s where all the magic is."

Technology and cultural shifts

Shift happens, says Joe Schoendorf, a partner in Accel Partners who’s a familiar presence on stage here. Some notable trends:

"Today’s college graduate will have 10 to 14 jobs by the age of 38." Wow!

"In one out of 8 marriages in the U.S. last year, the couple met online."

"What’s the No. 1 English-speaking country in the world?"  Ready? "China."

Yep, he checked that.

"In the next 100 years, video will be the dominant way in which we communicate," a profound shift from print and video. He cited the Chinese proverb: "One seeing is worth a thousand tellings."

There are 65 million active sites on Web, with 50,000 being added each day. (That number seems low to me, given that Technorati has said 70,000 new blogs are being added every day.)

The number of text messages sent each day exceeds the population of the Earth.

Here’s a fascinating generational factoid:

Email usage is still going up 15% a year among the general population. But among those under age 25, it’s the 3rd straight year of decline in email use by 15%.

"If you have kids in college, do not email them. They won’t read it. IM them."

Technological change is accelerating, he said, echoing a refrain popularized by Ray Kurzweil. "Our lives are about kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes. The next generation will be about petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, yottabytes."   

"If you took all the people who’ve lived on Earth since Adam and Eve, someone calculated that you could put all the conversations ever uttered in human history on a 56 zettabyte disc."

He recommended a book that hasn’t received enough attention: John Naisbitt, author of the seminal work "Megatrends," has an important book that came out last fall: "Mindset." 

Schoendorf closed with the VC prayer: "Dear Lord, one more bull market before I die."

Second Life

Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab (which I wrote about in Darknet), is on stage talking about the world’s most popular virtual world, Second Life.

"The terrain in Second Life is five times the size of the city of San Francisco and growing very rapidly."

Chris (Logan Linden), a technical assistant represented by a dreadlocks-wearing avatar, says, "We have 830 members who make more than $1,000 a year (in real world dollars) through transactions on Second Life."

Rosedale: "In a virtual world, you’re never alone."

The virtual Web

Now we have How Real Is the Virtual Web?

Jaron Lanier — inventor of the term virtual reality and whom I interviewed for PopTech in 2002 — is on stage. Not long ago he was on a college campus and a student came up to him and said, "Jaron Lanier – wow, you’re still alive?!" Ah, Internet years.

I’m friends with Ethan Fasset, who jumped from Yahoo! to Gaia Online. Craig Sherman, CEO of the popular online game site, says the site gets a million posts a day, the second largest message board on the Net. The site has 60,000 people on it at any one time.

Lanier, a "hard-core gamer," posits that having a physical identity or avatar makes people more social, responsible and civil than they otherwise might be if they remain anonymous behind a keyboard without a virtual representation. Our natural impulse toward empathy overwhelms the antisocial tendencies. He said that while petty spats are common on sites like Twitter, the theater-like environment of Social Life militates against confrontation.

Rosedale: "When we feel like we’re present with somebody else in Second Life and you have a real identity, we tend to be nicer. We’re nicer and closer to each other. … People who flame each other in forums become civil to each other when they’re brought face to face in Second Life."

Interesting, sounds right.

Great quote from Lanier: "Civility is the killer app of virtual worlds."

Venture capital love fest

Later, at the VCs: Are You Happy? panel, Roger McNamee, a partner in Elevation Partners:

"Fear is temporary but greed is permanent."

McNamee’s makeshift popularity index, in this order:

VCs
pond scum
telcos
cable operators

Erik Straser, partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures: "You need to put yourself in a position where the wave is gonna knock you over."

McNamee (to laughter): "With all due respect, you want to be carried by the wave."

"In the Valley," McNamee said, "we weren’t in the media business six years ago. Now we dominate every category except for television. We’re gonna get to television." Overstated, certainly, but it points up a shift in power from New York and Hollywood to Silicon Valley and smaller startups.

Engaging group, but no hard questions put to the VCs by the moderator.

Sen. John McCain coming up soon.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.