There are dozens, maybe hundreds of lists of things that happened in tech in 2007— Tech Crunch has multiples, read/write web has some. My interest here isn't in replicating lists of product releases, acquisitions, or deal flow, but in sharing thoughts on what some of the meaningful milestones were in 2007 in terms of moving social media and user-focused tools (what I insist is the heart of the Web 2.0 stuff) forward. With that, moments to note, in order of importance, of course.

1. Facebook developer API release, May 2007
It's no accident that I can recite the date that Facebook made the big announcement of its completed API and first set of developer deals—this release was the true tipping point for the mainstream media and business sectors to see the amazing power and opportunity in both widgets and social media. Developing FB as an ecosystem where tools could be imported was a brilliant strategy, and the fact data could get in, but couldn't necessarily get out wasn't obvious to most developers till they'd put there apps up-And of course, the businesses that benefit the most, like Slide and Rock You, had nothing but upside (and server costs) from the get go. And let's not forget to mention the thousands of over-35 digerati and techies that poured onto FB, eventually dragging a huge chunk of the rest of the knowledge class with them.

2. Knight Foundation awards over $8MM in grants to fund citizen journalism and social media open source and participatory projects
Tech-driven tools are fabulous, and Facebook is amazing, but those of us in the Valley sometimes forget that for lots of people widgets are “miscellaneous thingamajigs” and Facebook is a preppy web site none of their friends belong to, and why would they? That's why the Knight Foundation's development of this new funded program and their first disbursement of over $8MM to a host of developers and services is so important.

Knight awarded $1MM to Adrian Holovaty, someone with a proven track record of innovation and consumer adoption at chicagocrime.org, the Lawrence, Kansas newspaper and community web sites (think college town), and the always striving to be first Washington Post web site, to develop hyper local community tools that normal people can use to share information literally block by block—and gave even more money to a set of universities-- Arizona State (which went off and hired Dan Gillmor), Medill/Northwestern, MIT, and several more—to develop programs to fast forward the integration of digital media and technology literacy. Plus, they gave smaller grants to services like Placeblogger to build out their services and tools.

This is funding of impactful people to do things that will make a difference—without worrying about proprietary code, flipping companies, or pleasing the board. (Disclosure: I have an affiliation with Knight.)

3. Womens' networks—get big, big, big
Sugar Publishing says they hit 3.5 million unique users in April 2007; Glam claimed 19.1 million unique users in June 2007 (which Arrington disputed); Hearst bought Kaboodle in August 2008 to create its own network, presumably, and Blogher, the most bootstrapped of the bunch ($5 mil in funding reportedly) made its way into Technorati's top 100 starting this summer.

Given that “women” is one of those amorphous categories that cover everything from mommyblogging to finance, seeing interest in this segment skyrocket—fueled of course by advertiser's interest in the reach these networks can deliver—it's exciting to see how ad-targeting is fueling revenue growth in these sectors—and how the competition to permanently take this space away from NBC- iVillage just keeps piling on—and interesting to wonder if advertisers are looking to top blogs like Lifehacker and Engadget to direct ads to, as well.

4. Flickr spawns an ecosystem: ffffound! And Winer's flickrfan shows that FB ain't the only ecosystem social media game in town (and it's not a roach motel)

Visitors to Dave Winer's house have long been able to see some of the ingenious cams and image streams he's created for his own interests, but flickrfan—which launched just a few days ago-- takes the concept that an image stream can be impactful and interesting and turns it into a platform of sorts that anyone with a Mac and a High Def TV—or other digital projection device—can set up and savor. Ffffound! a still in beta image sourcing service, allows users to view streams of images, many *curated* from Flickr, and save the ones they like, presumably as a way to then find others/demonstrate affinity through image selection.

For me, these are momentous tools because they take user generated content distribution one step further---maybe many steps further—and make it into an art.

5. Fair and appropriate use becomes a bigger issue
2007 was the year when YouTube took down a Richter Scales video because photographer Lane Hartwell protested an uncredited, unapproved use of an image she took. A few months earlier, blogger Violet Blue raised a ruckus when Flickr removed a number of images from her photos stream without discussion. Both situations sparked huge discussion in the blogosphere and in the media and both had satisfactory resolutions, but what matters here is that even in the Creative Commons flavored, participatory media context that flickr images sometimes live in, issues of ownership, credit, permissioning, fair use and appropriatenessness stand front and central.

If anything, having sharing images (and music) are going to make our need to have standards, filters, and processes more acute than ever, since the amount of visual information we're exposed to—along with our kids—becomes larger and more diverse by the second.

6. What is the measure of the social graph? becomes a question we debate.

There was some (strong) resistance when Facebook execs started using the term “social graph”, but when Brad Fitzpatrick published his essay on the social graph in August 2007, the term entered the digisphere—and stayed—there are 819,000 today references for “social graph” on Yahoo, and 307,000 on Google. Brad posited the problem as the need to map everyone in a centralized fashion, so data can be ported; the term also means those to whom you are connected-and want to maintain connections with, across sites.

Social Graph rolls up questions about Friend of a Friend (FOAF), OpenID, and social network fatigue in a way that urges developers to see solutions. Interestingly, Scott Karp has a post this week arguing that email is the next manifestation of the social graph, especially for people over 30 (how about 40, Scott?), and that the under 30 killer apps are not web based at all—they're handheld communications such as SMS and phone calls—I think Scott is right, but the true question is data portability and interoperability—

Once we scale beyond the 150 or so people a high schooler might know, technology and standards become essential parts of the tool set and that's the problem set no one has yet elegantly solved.

7. Social Network disillusionment manifests, aka Wikipedia rises and falls, along with digg, the wisdom of crowds and the longest long tail
There was the moment when the Wikipedia people said they might run out of money for servers.. Then there was the moment we all said digg was the new myspace, the cool place for people and data, and Netscape copied that before it shut down, and then there was the moment when we all realized that the long tail didn't really make anyone but Amazon a bunch of money.

Do I mean that we found out that the emperor has no clothes? No, I mean that we learned that as social media matures, we're paying attention long enough so that we notice when the flaws and fallacies show, and we take a more measured view.

8. Ad networks become the new black—and the sure-est take over targets
In 2007, we saw the acquisition of Blue Lithium by Yahoo! and Doubleclick by Google. These were just two of the ad network acquisitions—in the world where ad targeting is nirvana and video is racing along—ad networks are the core thing—and 2007's acquisition sheets reflected that.

9. 9. Unconferences, co-working, and barcamps soared to new heights
1,000 people at barcamp block in Palo Alto in Palo Alto in August, 185 people at Shes Geeky in October, all sorts of similar events around the country--we've turned the corner on what Winer dubbed an unconference in 2003.

10. People are still the OS, even if widgets are flavor of the moment.

"...I have 205 friends on Facebook. I have 124 friends on MySpace. I have 117 professional contacts on LinkedIn. I share my most personal writings with my 113 closest friends on a private network. There are 109 blogs in my “always read” folder. I follow 56 people religiously on Twitter. I realize that these numbers may seem low compared with some social media hounds, but here's my commitment: (with the occasional exception of blogs,) these are all people I actually care about and am genuinely connected with. My networks are valuable to me and I fight to keep them that way."

--Sarah Dopp, dopp juice, writing about her extrememe connectedness, borderline addictions, and boundaries around excessive cell phone usage, among other things.

Susan sez: I love it when someone else besides me admits their compulsions. Thanks, Sarah!

“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who've done work in a related area but not in your specific field. Make it possible for someone who doesn't report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”

--Cynthia Barton Rabe, author of “ Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” quoted in a NY Times article on how relying on expertise leads to lack of questioning and familiar results.

Susan sez: This is a role consultants often fill, but one managers should build into their own planning, IMHO.

"Jamie Lynn Spears and her pregnant peers are the victims of a one and half billion dollar social experiment: the national implementation of the abstinence until marriage policy. For the duration of the Bush administration, the policy of preference is to simply tell teens not to have sex before marriage. Like the Just Say No to drugs campaigns of the Reagan years, it too has been a colossal failure. Abstinence-only programs have not succeeded in convincing kids not to have sex, but have led many not to use contraception."

--Christina Page, writing in The Huffington Post on the Jamie Lynn generation

Kicking back in Ohio still with limited online access.

These cookies represent where my brain has been for the past few days.

Transitioning back to the real world, slowly.

I am in Cleveland and it's snowing!

First trip to Cleveland, first snow of the year.

(credit: tbarnadii, flickr)

Packing for my trip and listening to Pandora, "Nick Drake Radio" where the track de jour is the very lovely and melancholy Kathy's Song by Simon and Garfunkel, followed by more (thank God!) Nick Drake. Looking forward to a week away, a week out of the valley,

"As a leader of people, you search within your core to find a genuine common thread that exists to unite and inspire a multi racial, multi ethnic, mixed gender, global community called Red Hat. You attempt to create a culture of open mindedness and respect for diversity. You seek out those who believe that for any democracy to continue, free and unfettered access to information is an unassailable condition for advancement."

--Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik, writing on the red hat site as he moves up to Chairman of the Board, a non-operational role, as former Delta airline COO Jim Whitehurst, comes aboard.

In what might be the department of too much information (TMI), but what feels like a delighful contrast, here's a screenshot someone on the team sent me of what the Yahoo! Personals start page looked like back in the dark ages of 1998, before there really even was a Personals product outside of Yahoo! classifieds.

Susan sez: Takes me right back to the days of, oh, 15 tags or so in plain ol' HTML, eh?

The Personals product team has been working on upgrading our Personals site and user experience for a while now, but this latest release transforms one of the most visited parts of the service--the Signed In Home page, the log in page for both searchers and posters.

The team's worked hard to re-think this page to offer more efficiency, speed, and value--the new design offers a hierarchy of critical activities (checking messages and who's viewed you, searching for matches, editing your profile) in a way that makes them more accessible and info rich right on this one page; there's also a new search feature we call the Carousel which allows a searcher to look at relevant search results right from the signed in home page, rather than having to go to search results.

We've just released, so we're still watching stats and user feedback, but it's looking good.
I'm also pleased about the development path the Front End engineers followed to build this--we have a new modular development framework that adds speed and flexibility to the work flow--and a much richer look and feel.

I came across this striking picture taken by an artist/designer named Protey Temen who works at zunge design studios in Moscow, RU.

His work is colorful, bold, interesting--I wish I could own a copy of this photo--and his illustrations are great, too.

(Via ffffound)

Susan sez: This visual curating and commenting is so addictive and compelling to me.

"My new FB strategy is not exclusively about "friends" in the truest sense of the word. Its about three layers of "friends"

The first layer has my real friends. Those people who who I have actually met in real life and who I enjoy keeping in touch with. FB provides a great way to keep up with things with them via pictures, notifications, etc.

The 2nd layer is people who I have tangential connections to. They may just live in Dallas Fort Worth. They may be self proclaimed Mavs or MMA or movie fans, or in groups I'm in. For whatever reason there is something about them that I could connect to.

The 3rd layer is emerging as a very unique and interesting network in FB.
Its what I will call "The Power Layer." These are people who in whatever industry they are in , retain some level of power. Having them as FB friends, although very simple and non committal, gives me some level of access to them, and them to me. These are people that if they sent me a FB mail, i would certainly read and respond to , and I think they would do the same."

--Mark Cuban, who hit the 5,000 friend Facebook limit, now commenting on how he sees his network.

"I didn't believe it because Jamie Lynn's always been so conscientious. She's never late for her curfew. I was in shock. I mean, this is my 16-year-old baby."

-- Lynne Spears, mother to Britney Spears and younger sister Jamie Lynn, commenting in People Magazine on news the 16 year old is preggers by a boy she met in church.

Scott Gatz is retiring from Yahoo! after 10 years--I want to wish him all the best. As one of the early RSS obsessives, I remember how so many of us lobbied Scott, who was one of the first product people at a large portal to develop an interest in RSS, and one of the first to integrate syndicated feeds into the larger MY service.

Two years ago, when I was debating leaving consulting to come work at Yahoo!, Scott was one of the people I sought out to chat with. He was so kind, so helpful--and so positive about Big Purple; the chat we had was one of the factors that got me to yes with the job I have now.

Best of luck, Scott--you leave your team in great hands with Chad, and I look forward to hearing about what is going to inevitably become your next adventure.

"...there is a persistent tendency for Democrats to participate more fully in social technologies. Looking at the index (all adults = 100), you can see that Democrats are at least 10% more likely to do just about anything involving social technologies. The Republicans are the opposite -- they're a lot LESS likely to participate (like Nixon's "silent majority"). They're 22% less likely to be a social network (Joiners) and 21% less likely to be uploading video or blogging (Creators). These are not extreme differences, but there are definite tendencies here, likely correlated to the fact that Republicans tend to be older than Democrats on the average. Notice that the Republicans are near par for Spectators, though -- they're watching, even if they're not as active participants. The Independents are somewhere in the middle, approaching the average in Joiner and Critic activity."

-Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research, writing about the social profile of political candidates.

"One of the greatest lessons I have learned and continually must practice is that in order to really be in control, I must surrender. In the martial arts (and golf) things must be held lightly. Grabbing too tight, whether it's my ego, my trowel, or my action lists, can be dangerous and ultimately ineffective. I must at a moment's notice be ready to let go, walk away from it all, and do nothing. Nothing at all."

David Allen, GTD guru, writing at The Huffington Post, writing about the gracefulness (and grace) of slowing down in this busy season.

"...The Richter Scales guys are not evil, they were just lazy. Contacting all those photographers would have been really time-consuming. But it was the right thing to do, and they didn't do it. This kerfuffle is their fault, not Lane's."

--Derek Powazek, commenting on the Lane Hartwell/Richter Scales/YouTube situation

Susan sez: Derek's longer post is the epitome of fair and balanced, IMHO and well worth a read for anyone following this fracas.

Ev Williams: Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea---a great post for everyone creating products.
NYTimes: Nick Denton takes over as ME, Gawker.
PEW Internet: New study on privacy and identity--Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago.

"My intent for weblogs in 1997 was to make the web as a whole more transparent, via a sort of "mesh network," where each weblog amplifies just those signals (or links) its author likes best. 1998-1999 was for me the Golden Age of Weblogs..."

(Via Scoble)

"Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow as like make me tired as not. I go my myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged by a self that can never be still, pushed by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.

I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn this, my weakness, smites me. A glass of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark- ness of clouds at one o'clock obsess me. I weep for all of these or laugh."

Saturday morning, hanging out and chilling, dozens of books on the coffee table: Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven (thanks, Amy), The Last Chinese Chef(thanks, Viv), Simply Irresistible (thanks, Rad), and about 10 more; Sister Rosetta Tharpe singing on the sound system, eggs, chicken sausage, potatoes, fruit, toast just consumed.

Hiking and shopping later, along with publishing my BlogHer holiday guide to gifts that can spice up your relationship, a get together tonight, and maybe a movie.

"The premise of citizen journalism is that regular people can now collect information and pictures with video cameras and cellphones, and distribute words and images over the Internet. Advocates argue that the acts of collecting and distributing makes these people "journalists." This is like saying someone who carries a scalpel is a "citizen surgeon" or someone who can read a law book is a "citizen lawyer." Tools are merely that. Education, skill and standards are really what make people into trusted professionals. Information without journalistic standards is called gossip."

--David Hazinski, former NBC correspondent and now academic professor, writing in the AJC about how educated, literate people are making the (awful) mistake of thinking they have the right to communicate with one another, share information, and have discourse, even though they haven't been to J-School to take classes with people like him.

Susan sez: Oops! Is your self-interest showing, Professor?

So Facebook is now going to license its APIs for use on other services--ie, they're willing to distribute a social network OS (SNOS?).
And Google has Open Social.

But where are the open standards?
Pointers, please!

A first: three simultaneous links to my blog posts on this edition of techmeme.

Geeze, I am now feeling heard.

"...to me the heart of Web 2.0 is the user.
The enduring lesson of all of the social media and emerging technologies is that we've created an a la carte, do it yourself platform where users can engage with sophisticated forms of search, feeds, metadata and APIs, social networks and identity, and commerce and fill these vessels with their own information
--And that's the heart of the revolution, IMHO.
The tools power it, but the people do it.
And I celebrate them."

--Susan Mernit, September 2005.

I've never quoted myself before, but I'm amazed at how long ago I said this..and how much it still holds true for me.

"...as reputation becomes portable and discoverable, who you choose to be your identity provider will matter....
(snip)
...Data portability in and of itself is simply not interesting; keeping track of stuff in one place is hard enough as it is, let alone trying to pass it between services or manage it all ourselves, on our own meager hard drives. We need instead to frame the discussion in terms of real-world benefits for regular people over the situation that we have today and in terms of economics that people in companies who might invest in these technologies can understand, and can translate into benefits for both their customers and for their bottom lines.

--Chris Messina, writing about his current project to create more porous and distributed SN and identity/information portability.

Susan sez: This is the Holy Grail for us social media/web 2.0 types: How to create secure and portable identity and information exchanges that can be embedded or integrated into services in a way that allows users--that operating system, remember?- maximum control and options. I am so excited at Chris' post and how much he gets it and look forward to hearing more.

The NY Times reports that P enthouse has indeed acquired the Friendfinder sites, as in alt.com, AdultFriendfinder, and lots of others made with the same template. The Times also calls them social networks--which made me laugh, because they're pretty much hook-up sites, which you could consider to be a pretty specific kind of social network (F*Bs?), but. geeze, I've never heard that excuse before.

Quoted price is $500MM; more comments here.

Susan sez: If you're not put off by the category, this is a GREAT investment; sex fuels the net, even if it's in a shadow world that isn't easily reported. However, if PH really thinks they are buying social networks I am scared for them--and I have to believe the NYTimes reporter is too smart to fall for that unless they said it. Hmmn...no, I am not going to go there!

Seriously, this could be a great chance to grow the business-or not, depending on if they find the right people to hit it hard for them.

"After debating this for the past few weeks, I've decided to make my entire flickr stream private.

My images are being stolen and used in ways that I am not comfortable with on an almost weekly basis, sometimes several times in a week. I have blogged about it, talked about it here on my stream, and yet people still feel that my creative property is theirs to take and do with as they please."

--Photographer and interesting person Lane Hartwell, posting on flickr on her decision to make her photos private due to theft. Her image of Valleywag's Owen Thomas appeared in The Richter Scale's video Here comes another bubble, which was just removed fron YouTube due to a "copyright claim by a third party."

So I've been thinking of a post about how I use twitter, facebook and linked in and the blogosphere and the tweetworld have gone noisy today with posts on similar topics.

So here's my deal:

LinkedIn: Have over 1,000 connections, use it as an online address book. Link with friends, colleagues, professional acquaintances so I can find them when I need to. Level of contact with most people: Low.

Facebook: Have over 1,000 connections, more on the friend side, but also including professional colleagues. Like to use it as an address book, but especially love the wide-ranging status updates and seeing what people say and do. Interaction level is high, both broadcasting updates and communicating with specific people 1:1.

twitter: I have maybe 100 people I follow; half that who follow me, and my focus is friends--i.e. I have spent 1:1 time with you in the real world and I care whether you brushed your teeth or had trouble at customs (at least a little). I am not reading you so you can market to me. In other words, interaction very high, but my use of it closer to a closed circle than a porous network.

Or, it's the conversationsphere, baby.

Or, to spell it out: LinkedIn is the broad circle, FB the known universe, and twitter a smaller group. If I had more non tech friends on twitter, I'd focus on them,

Or, in other words, it's not YASN (yet another social network) it's LOSN (lots of social networks), each with their own hierarchy of value and exchange.

(And if I were the proprietor of any social media property--or even of a social search tool--I'd be reading this post right now and asking myself what spheres I'd want my product to fall into for the user and how I might present features and experiences that would support that goal.)

Ralph Meijer: Federated Social Networks aka "citizen centric web services”--distributed, portable, open-what is next, beyond RSS.
(Via Chris Messina's tweet)
NY Times: Ask goes private
Rich Skrenta: PageRank wrecked the web. "Two years later and rel=nofollow is still bugging folks."

My Monday column is up at Blogher.

"The internet is no more culpable for people 'wasting' time away than the television was, and the radio before that, and the electric light before that–on back through history marked by one invention or another. Technology does not change culture, as much as technology and culture impact, equally, on each other. As scientists, inventors, and historians have long known and remarked: the time is always ripe for the invention. In other words, the culture drives the invention, which drives the culture, which drives the invention and so on."

--Shelley Powers, Burningbird, commenting on Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which Lessing laments our diminishing interest in books and reading, as quoted by Nick Carr.

(Via Rex Hammock)

Marc Orchant, who had a coronary about a week ago, has died--I learned about it from a twitter stream just now.

So sad--condolences to his family, and all his friends and colleagues.

So Widgety Goodness, the widgets conference in Brighton that took off on a phrase and on a 2006 blog post I wrote--happened last week in Brighton, UK.

It was kind of a trip to send a video instead of show up (not that I had time to travel to London), and it was super cool to see the video projected at the conference start (just wish I had a link so you all could hear it)

Sounds like it was interesting, with comments on the event available here and here and YouTube videos here.

The archival aspects of YouTube are sometimes truly something to savor: This morning, I am surfing the Wet Spots, and end up with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a truly amazing gospel singer from the 50s, which leads me to look for The Swan Silvertones, a historical gospel group from much earlier.

And what do you know? I'm listening to the a 1960s tape showing Claude Jeter and the fellas singing Only Believe --and it's great. As is the YouTube vid of Claude doing Lord I've Tried.

Over the past week, I've pulled up all sorts of compelling footage, from Jimi Hendrix to Miles Davis, Solomon Burke, Tom Moulton and--yes--the Cockettes.

Is this cultural literacy or a major time sink? Both.

Common wisdom agrees that LinkedIn is an appropriate social network for work--particularly around posting resumes, head-hunters, job listings etc. And similar common wisdom agrees that Facebook is a former college student outpost that is now heading into the mass market, with a focus on friendship, local, community--and all sorts of cool, diverse tools via that API.

So, of course, in the 8 months I've been on FB, I've seen my *friends* go from the close friends who had accounts and the web geeks I tribe with to just about everyone, from long lost buddies, to former co-workers, to friends' kids, and so on--but there's an increasing number of people I'd consider *work friends* or 'a year ago they would have asked me on linkedin' kinds of friends I get asked to add. (And then there are the people I don't know at all, or who turns out to want to market me something, arrghh...)

Anyway, this got me thinking about virality and acquisition--and how FB does an intrinsically better job of helping a user acquire *friends* but how much more diverse and undefined by the service itself those friendships are (this is a good and a bad thing, right?)

Basically, I've been on LinkedIn for, oh, 4 years, and I have maybe 900 connections. I've been active on FB for 8 months and I have over 1,000 connections. Why?

My contention is that FGB is winning in virality for the following reasons:

• Technology and design: Superior acquisition tools, like the friend finder
• Generalities: More diffuse focus means more people feel free to request linking (aka friendship)
• Community/affinity: People have a stronger interest in using FB in non-linear ways; ie demonstrating affinity through their connections (why else would anyone want to friend someone they don't really know at all?)

Any thoughts to share here?

"...between Facebook and Google's platforms, we're quickly heading down a path that leads us to a kind of stratefied Internet Explorification of the web that we haven't seen since Firefox 1.0 came on the scene. Already we're seeing inconsistencies between the existing OpenSocial containers and it's only going to get worse the more try to work to the unfinished specs. As for Facebook apps, well, for every Facebook app built to run inside of Facebook, that's one less app that, today, can't run on the Open Web and then God kills another kitten."

-- Chris Messina, web geek, writing about how iterative development makes great products, time after time--and how very few get it right at 1.0.