I started taking notes about halfway through this morning’s session about the Social Web with Mike Speiser from Yahoo, JB Holston from NewsGator, David Liu from AOL, and Martin Varsavsky from Fon. Here follow my inadequate notes (sorry if I misqoted) and my own (silent) commentary, in italics.

Martin: Facebook is gathering mini-crowds, not individuals. You don’t have to sit next to people you don’t like on the plane, and you don’t care who’s in the other sites. It’s relevant to you and has the people you like. You don’t care about the other people’s ideas, you can move in a world that’s to your liking. The platform they offer can be huge, but (unlike the airlines) they have to protect you.

Kevin: But isn’t there value in the random connections, the accidental learnings we get by being placed next to a stranger?

JB: I bet there are self-contained pockets that aren’t connected to the outside world. Are there?

Mike: It’s a small number of people who are the connectors.

Martin: This issue is best addressed with discovery tools. The mobile device that shows you music you didn’t know about. It’s a good example, that through the influencers, via your friends, you will learn about something new.

Mike: You may identify yourself as Republican, but you might learn something new, StumbleUpon might show you something. Search experiments with personalization aren’t that popular. It’s perhaps better to show everything and let people be their own editors.

David: We’re launching some algorithms at AOL that help get at more successfully what the user wants. Integrate the rostered social networks. I’ll discover new things from my friends that I couldn’t have found by myself.

JB: But all of this propagates the A-List effect. You’re not going to get very far down the long tail.

David: The content has to be good, if your algorithm displays it it has to be about quality.

AOL: We want to make sure we are upfront and transparent – the value the user can derive in exchange for some of this information is powerful. You can’t bucketize people, but you can look at tendencies and what they’re thinking.

Matt Bartel from YouRankIt: Discovery – this is things people already like. When is it more important to have a top-down editor system than user preferences? The most popular articles on CNN are about Paris Hiton, while Digg has different stories…

Martin – so discovery vs. personalization: NetVibes has launched the “personal universe” – an oxymoron. If you go to netvibes.com/martinvarshavsky you see my whole universe, the feeds I get, the blogs I like and so on. It’s an example of trying to go beyond. What Joost is trying to do – some of these guys are on my board – hopefully we can enable them – when you compare Joost to YouTube, you have a lean-back TV watching experience into a learn-forward experience.

IWH: The only reason I watch TV is to lean back.

David: There will always be a place for curated content – it’s the blend of both, you can turn up discovery if you choose to do so.

Amy Wohl – I’m disappointed by the comments I’ve heard about the Long Tail from the panel. There are so many people who don’t want to see articles about Paris Hilton. So many people want something different, and the people who provide something different enjoy the distribution channel. Do you have a way of encouraging long tail?

David: How did you get this impression we said that? The long tail is incredibly important. The web shouldn’t always be curated content. It needs a higher presence for individuals.

IWH: But Let’s not confuse the Long Tail with uncurated content. Not all uncurated content is the long tail. The point is that if you’re only showing the popular stuff, it will be so much harder for people to find the unpopular stuff.

David: there won’t be 10 million companies that are successful, there will be scale winners. I’ve been playing with Ilike – I’ve discovered wonderful music. I’ve been a great fan of long tail. People use these terms for 20 different meanings. How many times do people search per day? There is so much content that discovery tools will dramatically improve the experience of browsing. The Long Tail isn’t the answer for everything. We can only consume so much, there will only be so many successful companies.

IWH: It’s not really understanding the value of the Long Tail if you see your life’s work as the act of conquering it. Yahoo, and in fact all search mechanisms that give popularity real importance, are about filtering out the “useless stuff” that only one person has looked at. And the Long Tail is about letting that “useless stuff” in, because it’s useful to some of us. Compare ordered search results to the way Amazon shows book recommendations: you can see the ones lots of others looked at, but you can also see the ones that only a few others looked at. The Amazon way strikes me as somehow different, although I don’t know much about their algorithms. When overall popularity is lessened as a factor in my recommendations, it matters to me.

Martin – the difference between web 1.0 and now – I invested in a company with 2 employees, the Digg of Spain. it’s profitable, they have 2 million users. This isn’t a huge success for Yahoo, but for Benjamin and Ricardo it’s awesome. So somebody buys them. Are they allowed to retain their identity? The large companies want the economics, and they let the companies retain their personality.

David: AOL doesn’t have to own these companies or blogs to be successful. The web is distributed, people will go to 100K different websites as diverse as our interests. If we want to participate, we have to make those experiences more effective. It would make the entire web more successful. We want more people using these services, because we’re taking share from traditional media, and the only way to do that is to get more of them using our services, collectively, with applications that we can use to help them.

Can we let small websites with no infrasturcture have free online storage for upload, why not?

Audience: Can you talk about stated preferences vs. assumed preferences? CNN vs. Digg?

David: Lots of research shows people don’t know what they want. They want the social experience is that we share the benefit of both having read the same book. Watching the user’s actions is a better way to find out what they want.

IWH: It always rubs me the wrong way when people use research that says people don’t know what they want to justify not paying attention to what people say they want. I know the research is out there, but let’s not use it as an excuse for anything

JB: Lurkers are people too, so I totally agree. Not everybody will put in their preferences.

David: Facebook and Myspace are addressing the personal relevance issue the best, that is why they are so successful. It’s a great first point of contact. It’s a way to discover relevant applications and recommendations, and I can do it without bothering the friend. Voyeuristic is overstating it.

Martin: Facebook will be worth 20 Billion and bigger than MySpace by the end of next year. I don’t think this is a crazy guess. I use money as a measure of success because many people relate to it. At Fon, when we let Foneros personalize their access points with their profiles, their neighbors learn about them so there’s a long tail of geography, and people care about the people who live next to them.