About thirty of us are squeezed into a room. Dana Boyd (“zephoria“) is the ad hoc discussion leader.

(Scoble is right behind me and says the he would read my blog if I said bad things about him. So here goes: Scoble is, um, wearing a hat. And his son is adorable. Damn! I have to get the hang of this blog nastiness thing.)

The group skitters uncomfortably around the actual definition of “social software.” We’re trying to avoid it. Instead, we’re giving examples of social software that we find interesting. Examples: software that tracks one social network. Scott Heiferman of meetup.org talks about the value of semi-organizing real world meetings; there’s of course room for completely self-organizing groups, he says, but Meetup is designed to provide some structure around setting times and finding venues.

Andy Baio explains his new site, upcoming.org, that lets people schedule their outings to events and then find friends who are going to those and other events.

Fred Stutman (sp? I can’t see his tag) points to how our ability to establish an identity has facilitated social software. (I am much more ambivalent about the coming of digital IDs.)

Bill Janeway of Warburg Pincus talks about what corporations are going to have to learn the lessons of social software, discovering the actual social interactions that are enabling the business processes.

Ross Mayfield of SocialText talks about his company’s approach. (I’m on their Board of Advisors.) It’s at the other end of the spectrum from the social workflow that Bill was discussing.

of Denounce mentions one of his recent parodies: Blossier, a dossier for bloggers.

Someone wonders whether the rise of social software will cause the system to break. Others dispute that. It’s self-correcting, suggests Scoble, among others.

Marc Smith of Microsoft Research talks about his research on threads. Things need to get roughed up at the edges and show wear so we know where to go. [I’m leaving after the first hour in order to go to the bittorrent talk.]

Categories: Uncategorized dw