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The Web2.0 Expo wrapped up on Friday. The quality of the sessions were second only to the quality and quantity of interesting people that I met at the conference. It is a fun conference to attend with a lot of experimentation going on (Fireball, Blogtropulous quizes, Twitter-influenced sessions). Looking at the sessions I attended, my learnings centered around the themes of personal informatics, social media, gaming, and mobile. Here are a couple of takeaways.

• Use Data Politely - There is a wealth of user data that every website should leverage, but users should be given full control on how data is used and stored.
• Make Data Use Relevant - All that data needs to be used in ways that are relevant to users. Relevant use of data = strong value proposition.
• Empower Users - When planning your site, try to stay away from over planning and creating a inflexible, controlled experience. Listen to your user community, give them the tools and let them lead you to where your site should go.
• Leverage Human Psychology - Games have a history of creating compelling user experiences through tapping basic human desires: Collecting, Obstacles, Resources, Achievement, Recognition, and Personalization. Any website can use these traits to create more compelling experiences for their users.
• Mobile Creates Context - Most data on the web lacks the context needed to build predictive models. Mobile devices automatically provide the important contexts of who, when and where. Yahoo! is doing some really cool things in this area.
• Community is Key - For many web businesses, success or failure will largely be determined by their ability to build a strong community. This needs to become a priority for companies.

I will be attending the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco this month. Please let me know through twitter, LinkedIN, or the comment section that you are going. I would love to meet as many people as possible. This conference has so many streams of interesting topics that I feel like a kid in a candy store. It will be great nourishment for my mind. Even better is meeting all the amazing people passionate about this space. Awesome! I am nearing the end of my MBA program and looking to find the right career fit. I am looking for a product management/marketing or strategic business development position with a company in the web2.0 or mobile space. I appreciate any help spreading the word or if you have any suggestions of people who I should contact at the conference, please let me know.

I was fortunate enough to attend O'Reilly's Graphing Social Patterns conference earlier this week. It is exciting to be around so many people who are passionate about social networking and how technology is enabling new forms of connection. The crowd appeared evenly split among developers, business, and other interests. For business people it proved challenging to network and meet new people because people where constantly are heads down in their lap tops or cell phones. During conference speeches, you could constantly hear the tap, tap, tapping on the keys as people blogged, twittered, and coded. I met a number of very interesting people who were all passionate about what they do. A great experience. So what came out of the conference? I don't if there were any earth-shattering revelations, but I took away some interesting perspectives and ideas. Now, quite a few of the sessions were coder focused, so I ignored the detailed and grasped the broad strokes. Here are my big takeaways:

1. There was a definite call to focus social networks on individuals and less on platforms. "...stop looking at the system-centric social networking to citizen-centric"
2. I am glad that MyBlogLog is finally back to building up its services with new offerings such a location-based tracking using bluetooth technology. I agree, "It's the people coming to sites that is relevant"
3. While the big social network app's companies like RockYou and Slide seem to have a methodology of building a user base of their app's, I am not convinced that the Ad Model is a sustainable monetization model.
4. I want to learn more about micro payment options in North America. Would we accept paying $1 per month for a compelling app? Or how can we encourage users to pay for more compelling experiences - whether it is a virtual good or enhanced functionality.
5. The recent actions by Facebook to slow the App-Spam is really stumping the current App success stories on how to make new apps go viral. Most have concluded create compelling user experiences right off the bat.
6. When thinking about compelling app's remember humans like collecting things, progression, interacting, exchanging, and customizing.
7. There are some opportunities in social games.
8. Enhanced-functionality-app's seem a logical next step in social network app progression, but what functionality do we need in a MySpace/Facebook environment?
9. LinkedIN is perfect for enhanced-functionality app's and businesses (or at least business people) will pay for it.
10. There are alot of homemade YouTube video songs on social networking.

I will be taking a small hiatus from MBA program to attend O'Reilly's Graphing Social Patterns in March. GSP looks to be a great conference for anyone interesting in social networking. I am excited to meet fellow bloggers and people in the industry. Let me know if you are attending.