Pic: Dan Farber; from left-to-right: Tina, Mena, Saul (doing a very good Robert Di Niro impression), Gil, Craig

Panel Blurb: "Users are becoming active co-creators of their media, commerce, entertainment, and communications experiences. Just how significant, though, is this phenomenon? How are business and social interactions likely to change in the era of peer production, and what are the implications for both newcomers and existing industries?"

Discussion:

Tina from AOL says opening up APIs is key now to get users to co-create. Mena from SixApart says people using their tools [MT, Typepad, etc] is key. Saul from Skype says Skype is focusing on enabling people to have conversations - voice is central, but video, sms and other things are built around that. Mentions SkypeCasts is "a new way for people to engage in public conversations on the Web". Gil from Wikia - "trust the users", a lot of their content is "controlled by users". Says users control the site and what's on it. Craig from craigslist says his site aims to engage the people on his site.

Both Mena and Tina say that people want their communities to be intimate, rather than e.g. 1000 people. Kevin notes that there is value in scale though. Tina says that AIM is a good example - has 42M users, but everybody has small communities. Gil says larger projects inspire people on Wikia, so in that sense large communities work. Tina says that would work with topic-based communities (rather than social ones). Mena says wikis have a lot of "observers", but if you want to participate then people like their community numbers to be smaller.

Saul says Skype is aiming to enable conversations and is bringing voice to the Web, across national boundaries and connecting to tools like blogs. Says Skype is at the beginning of bringing this kind of rich conversational functionality to the Web platform.

Craig says he sometimes fantasizes about bringing voice to craigslist, but is for future and not now. Doesn't want to be distracted from his core business. Tina from AOL says voice online is a complement to IM or telephone etc - giving more options to communities of interest. Mena says little audio snippets is adding something to blogging (but she doesn't like podcasting). Saul says Skype deals in live communications (incl IM etc), but being able to record conversations and publish that is interesting to Skype over the next 12 months.

Kevin asks how to make the 'markets are conversations' idea real? Craig says: [companies should] just get out of the way.

Kevin brings up Nick Carr attack on Wikipedia. Gil says they are a participative democracy, but only a small percentage participate. There is a hierarchy that makes decisions over conflicts, but people do have the opportunity to participate. There will be "bad people", but this is natural in large complex communities.

There was more discussion after this, with lots of references to UGC (user generated content), participation, etc. But I've covered the main bits of the panel, so I'll wrap this post up.

A suggestion to begin our group was to leverage the strength of the bigco brands, to validate the space you're in. eg konfabulator originally released mac os widgets, then apple came in with the same product. So Konfabular changed to do windows widgets, but leveraging Apple's success in the widgets market. Of course Konfabulator was ultimately successful in (and led to an acquisition by Yahoo).

Mitch Ratcliffe brought up the metaphor of amoebas vs 800-pound gorillas. But he said another issue is amoebas vs 70-pound chimps - and the example he used is his own company vs Technorati.

Other suggestions from the group:

• Ask the question to users - what do you think of eg google coming into this space; what can we (small co) do about it?
• David Weinberger said: we like the companies that "are on our side" - whether a google or a small co (e.g. craig newmark)
• Look for another gorilla to help you - eg writely with google, to ward off microsoft.
• Become best of breed - focus on one thing and be better than the big gorillas at it - but don't try to become a gorilla; "worst case is you [gorilla] buy us"; reason is that you do it better - e.g. flickr better than picassa
• Be authentic - not just communication, but product focus [nb: authenticity was a big theme across all 4 groups]
• Build loyalty - customers, employees, investors

There was an interesting sub-theme that arose due to something Peter Pham from Photobucket brought up. He said his company started out doing something unique - direct linking - which didn't exist a few years ago. Now 3 yrs later they have 18M users. So his lesson is to pick something that is unique / serves a need. Differentiate was a word the group used. 

Somewhat controversially Peter then said that Photobucket isn't going to open up to allow users to export their photos - because they server mainstream users and see no need to do this. I'll address that in a future post!

Someone (JP) said that photobucket should listen to "the community element of the individual". For example if he's a Photobucket user, he'll want to continue to use photobucket, but not lock out his community of users (who may not use photobucket). So that was an interesting angle on the lock-in area.

JP: small cos should "solve unknown problems for unknown groups of customers" - instead of solving known problems for known customers (big cos - y!, aol etc); Big weapons require big targets. David Weinberger then repeated: people attracted to companies that are "on our side"; so don't use their ' weapons' against them!

There was some talk about focusing on real business values, instead of web 2.0 fuzziness. Won't repeat that here, because it's all obvious stuff (serve user needs etc).

Distribution qst: big cos have huge advantage; Hans Peter from Plum -- his main focus is solving user problems and distribution; finding the nodes (with shared/competitive needs) in the game and playing within that system; e.g. co-branding opportunites. Axel mentioned that word-of-mouth is key here. Robert Scoble had a good quote right at the start of the workshop which sums that up: "The word-of-mouth networks have become hyper-efficient."

All in all, an excellent discussion. This post is just a hurried re-cap, so may tidy it up later on. In the meantime if you have any further tips for small companies (like a 30Boxes) competing with a Google or Microsoft, please feel free to leave a comment here.