Stowe Boyd on Building Social Applications

On Sunday morning, April 15, Stowe Boyd, CEO of Blue Whale Labs, will be hosting a 3-hour workshop titled "Building Social Applications", one of six simultaneous workshops that will launch the Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone West in San Francisco. I don't know much about Stowe Boyd, though I have heard of him. A quick browse around the Web at his sites shows that he is very active in the area of the Social Web.

As you can see, my decision making process for what sessions I'll attend at the Expo hasn't advanced very far. I'm studying my choices for Sunday morning, and so far I haven't gotten any farther than looking at the first of the six choices for that time slot. I suppose you can walk from room to room -- but that doesn't change the fact that you can only take in 1/6 of everything that's going to be presented that morning.

Stowe Boyd at the AOL Dev 2.1 Conference

Stowe Boyd was at AOL on March 1, 2007, at AOL's Dev 2.1 Conference. There, he gave a presentation titled "Building Social Applications", which I'll assume talks about a lot of what's going to be in the workshop at the Expo. You can't directly compare a 1 hour presentation with a 3-hour workshop, but the presentation at AOL likely tells us what Stowe considers important. The workshop, then, is probably a "hands-on" demonstration of how to accomplish it.

I've had a note to myself to watch Stowe's entire AOL presentation for several weeks, so now's the perfect time to do that. Stowe started out his AOL talk by characterizing it as an abbreviated version of a workshop he did at a conference in Geneva -- confirming the above assumption. The slides presented at AOL are the same as what will be presented at the Web 2.0 Expo. The only difference is that the interactive portions of the workshop were bypassed at the AOL presentation.

Chacteristics of Successful Social Applications

Stowe says the most difficult questions he is asked are of the type:

Is my social application worth building? What are its chances of being a success?

Stowe says these are very difficult questions to answer. Questions that ultimately each developer / entrepreneur has to answer for themself. So, what can Stowe Boyd do for us? Well, Stowe is a bit like Socrates: he can lead us to the right questions we need to ask ourselves as we undertake our new endeavor.

Some quotes and paraphrases from Stowe Boyd's AOL presentation:

Me, Mine, and Market

Success comes from attracting a "me" to a site where there is a group of people who share the same interest ("mine") and a "market" where the solution to the problem can be obtained. The group provides advice and shared experience about the options for solving the problem.

More quotes and paraphrases:

Conclusion

I probably won't attend Stowe Boyd's workshop on Sunday morning April 15 at the Web 2.0 Expo. But I certainly intend to commend him on creating a suberb presentation on the state of Web 2.0 and the characteristics of successful modern social apps/sites.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media