The Panelists

Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon, among other things.
Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search, Microsoft
Todd Levy, Co-founder and Head of Product and Engineering, Bit.ly
George Zachary, Partner, Charles River Ventures
Kevin Burton, Founder/CEO, Spinn3r

Here is an unsorted list of snippets of information from last night’s talk The Real Time Web : Imperative or Insanity?:

• 40k tweets per minute tweets AND also 40k bit.ly urls made per minute. The parity is interesting.
• George Zachary of Charles River Ventures has invested in both Twitter and Yammer (Twitter for enterprise)
• George Zachary will invest in squirrels if they have a good business idea.  He said this (and it made the audience laugh including me) when he said he wasn’t sure why 95% of the entrepreneurs who approach him are male. VCs, he said, don’t have a bias in who they invest in if it makes sense as an investment.
• Hilary Mason, chief scientist at Bit.ly, has a blog post about lack of woman in technology.
• Systems competence (reliability of network) is a critical barrier to entry. You can steal ideas and you can steal the feature sets behind those ideas, but you can’t steal system competence nearly as easily.
• Charging for a service  is a friction to the user. This is an obvious point, however, like many obvious points, it’s easily forgotten.  Bit.ly decided not to charge regular people a minimal cost like $9.99. Instead, they’ll provide services for the enterprise and price accordingly.
• The real-time web is getting us back to more natural behaviors (conversations are synchronous, emailing are not)
• Posting on Facebook is neither personal nor public;  it’s a third dimension. Example given was a person who posted on Facebook a list of reasons he was thankful for people over the past year.
• Avvo – reviews about lawyers has been sewed (only) twice.
• Emerging problem to tackle: websites for reviews of people.
• Tokyo Cabinet is a great database system for certain problems; downside is only the one guy who understands it completely speaks Japanese. Time for a robust community to form!
• Twitter is popular in part because of the “illusion of audience”. Why do I tweet? Because I think all of my 1000 followers are listening to it.