At our RealTime CrunchUp event today in San Francisco, the first roundtable is entitled “Filtering the Stream: Getting Rid of the Noise.”
The panel is populated by a lot of big players in the space: Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox, Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal, Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur, Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal, CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss, Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng, Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor, MySpace, Chief Product Officer, Jason Hirschhorn, Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen, OneRiot, CEO Kimbal Musk, and Angel Investor Ron Conway. Our own Erick Schonfeld, Mike Arrington, Steve Gillmor are moderating.
Below find my live notes (paraphrased):
First everyone introduces themselves.
MA: So Brett and Chris were at the last CrunchUp did you sign the deal there?
BT: We met there (laughs).
ES: We’re increasingly consuming information through the streams of data. Address the noise problem, how do you do it?
CC: When we started working on Newsfeed we had a metaphor of the newspaper. It was a way to pull in a bunch of source and find what the reader found interesting. But it’s not just the newspaper, because that fully wouldn’t work. We really focused on trying to think about what you tell people first when you talk about a day or week. You focus on the important things first. It’s the right balance between a newspaper and a stream. It’s a big problem for all of us.
ES: Is your approach different from Twitter?
CC: I think it’s a problem we all have to worry about. There’s going to be more and more and more information.
ES: Ron, you can address this – how many companies you work with are on this?
RC: Most of the companies right now are dealing with the macro issues – like real-time search they’re working on the search. But there’s a huge opportunity here to be more specialized. Someone can say something like ‘we do have the best filter.’ Consumers will look for the best filtering mechanism in the next year.
ES: So what is the best filter?
RC: I think it’s UI and some deep intellectural property – and AI and semantics. Huge opportunity.
SG: Lilly you nodded about semantics.
LC: Yeah, we’re all think about time – search for ‘fort hood’ for example. There are opportunities to make it more personal.
SG: Geo will help with that right, how’s Microsoft thinking about that?
LC: First we have to see the data. We have Twitter data, but how are people going to use location data. How do you make that meaningful? Do you use maps? We’re very early.
JH: UI plays a big role in it. MySpace is concentrating on the stream through a media prism – what music and video are you looking at. We’ve had an open graph, so we have different revelency.
MA: He just threw down against Facebook. Did you say we’re better?
JH: That wasn’t my intention.
MA: Will you announce the imeem acquisition in real time.
JH: Not gonna happen. And it brings me great joy to disappoint you.
ES: You turns on status updates to Twitter. How big is that now.
JH: Yep. Twitter is growing greatly, and that relationship is doing well. I don’t know the stats, but we’re pretty big.
MA: Why won’t Facebook do that? Where’s the fear?
CC: I don’t think it’s something we won’t do. It’s something we’re looking at it, we need to do it the right way.
JH: It’s a pulse of pop-culture. It’s an additive thing.
ES: What’s the value of this stream data? Bing and Google cutting are deals, why?
AS: From Google’s perspective, these are the most exciting times for data creation. It’s exploding, it’s exciting. We’ve been thinking about since Google News and now Google Blog Search. The amount of data coming through is just amazing, and there are great things in it. And Google has expertise in filter and ranking it. Time is the biggest component. Your social graph, social circle, and geo information is all key now too. This is a new kind of information. We would love to get as much information as possible. We’re happy about the Twitter partnership. And we’re happy to get more – the more the better.
LC: I want to add to that. The social information is so interesting because it’s two-way information. It’s a dialogue, that’s really cool. I find out news about Microsoft via my Twitter feed before it’s even announced.
JH: There’s a difference too with how interesting real-time is for one user versus the collective.
JS: I agree. It seems like what’s we’re dealing with is a social finding experience. In Brizzly one of the most interesting things is the “mute” funtionality. Maybe you have to follow someone for social reasons, but you can mute him in your stream and still get his DMs, etc. All the companies here are dealing with different pieces of it.
SG: With FriendFeed you did a lot of filtering. Your thoughts?
BT: I work mostly on the Facebook Platform now. So it’s crazy to see how much it’s used by third-party sites. I now start believing in the opposite of aggregation, it’s all about using your social graph to filter now. I think this is more important than the problem of how do we mix information. If you stop thinking about it as one stream, all these products are producing way too much information, Facebook Connect can do filtering for you I think. If you want to read the comics, you read the comics, if you want to read the news, you read the news.
JS: I can’t believe we keep going back to the newspaper (laughs).
KM: Isn’t that Twitter though? You don’t value that.
BT: Sorry, I didn’t mean to say I didn’t value it, obviously I worked on that, but I think it’s hard to create the perfect experience that way. I think something like Lala has a better way of doing its own social experience, rather than just one giant stream. Realtime is a problem that every product has started to solve.
KM: I agree, but it’s the one stream that has built things like this conference. The problem is that when there are streams that aren’t open.
JH: Sometimes the social layer is a weakness too. I found my real-world friends weren’t as into music as I was. I found random people who were more interested in it. That’s why I think Twitter is important.
JS: People think of these networks in different ways too. Facebook is your real friends, Twitter you can find celebs.
JH: And that’s the reason to possibly mix them.
ES: The value of this data is greater when it becomes public?
KM: I think it’s all about the intent of the user. On Facebook you want personalized data. But aggregating data you’re not going to get it from your social circle. My mother is in your social circle. I don’t want to know about her.
LL: If a status update is public it provides more value? I disagree. Twitter isn’t growing outside of the old people like me. He’s 14, he doesn’t get it. He spends his time in Facebook. He doesn’t want it public. He wants it private. I bet there will be a lot of private growing on Twitter – that’s the key to their growth. Most people aren’t like us in the room.
ES: Why not create private groups in Seesmic?
LL: You can, throught Lists. Sadly, Facebook won’t let me at their filters through the API. We doubled the traffic of Seesmic Web in the last two weeks thanks to Lists.
AS: Shouldn’t all this information be available in one place though? Why go to all these different places? That’s the idea behind our new Social Search.
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