Last night, the Stanford VLab organization held a great talk on what they called lifestreaming. The rest of us might call it “how social networks and Web 2.0 are changing out lives”. It was my first event from VLab, but it was excellent.

Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, All Things Digital, Wall Street Journal was the moderator, but she was the least moderate on the panel. She did not pull any punches, especially with Loic Le Meur, Founder, Seesmic and Twitter junkie extraordinare. Even he admitted he twittered a little too much when he let people know when he was going to the bathroom.

An awkward question that she brought up was with so many social sites who are all focused on advertising, is there really any room for more and how can they make themselves different. The panel did agree that web sites seem to add feature after feature until they all start to do the same things. Yahoo was mentioned as a prime example of a company that adds feature after feature until no one uses anything. It was also used to point out the other big problem with tech sites. They may listen too much to the tech press (or as Kara described it “14 slightly overweight white guys) and not enough to the customer and Main St.

Leah Culver, Co-Founder at Pownce described the Pownce service as built by the her and the other co-founders to keep in touch with their friends. They have the smallest amount of advertising on the site, but what has been important to Pownce is charging users for a year-long premium memberships, also called pro accounts. Users with pro accounts can upload larger files and a few other services. She said that new services would be rolled out shortly. Her company managed to get $20k in the first few weeks that the site was launched thanks to these pro account. Her best advice is to figure out a way to monetize by some sort of addition feature that you can offer to premium users without alienating the basic users.

Culver’s favorite new site and service is Wakoopa, which lets you share what software you are using with your friends and vice versa. Basically, it is social networking for hard core programmers.

Bret Taylor, Co-founder, FriendFeed and formerly of Google, says that the key to the social networking site that he has founded is that you are using your friends and their trusted opinions to filter the fire hose of data that we have to deal with each day on the Internet. In the case of his site, they are not trying to monetize it yet. It is more important to build the community at this stage. He and his company is focused mainly on filtering, but we wants to put more focus on relevance of what is presented to the user going forward.

Loic Le Meur sees Seesmic as a video talk show open to everyone in the world. The idea is that you post a video talking about anything and somebody replies back with their own video. He is not monetizing the site yet and has no immediate plans to. He is serious about building this business (like the 4 other businesses that he built and sold in Europe). He had 3 offers to buy the company at Europe’s conference Web 2.0. Seesmic is creating branding channels for advertisers like their recent launch of the X-Files movie on their site. In the “good news for video sites”, bandwidth costs are decreasing. His company is paying on the order of $10k for their bandwidth. But he is not concern. His company has raised $12 million to ride out any market downturns. One of his investors is Jeff Clavier, Founder, SoftTech VC and on the same panel.

I need to send a big Thank You to Cheryl Contee for letting me know about some market research that comScope did almost a year ago.

Their research was to determine who in Europe is on the Internet and what are their top sites. I have to admit that I was really surprised by two of their findings. The first is that only about 11% of the population in Russia is on the Internet. Maybe part of the issue for Russia are the web sites that are available. The top three sites for most countries are things like Google or Yahoo. For Russia, I have never heard of their top sites. The second big surprise for me was how popular Microsoft’s MSN is in Europe, especially given how hard the EU has been on Microsoft for its monopoly. Wierd.

comScope also looked at the popularity of social networks, both at the total number of users and the popularity of each major social network across various regions. What is most amazing is looking at the change in the total number of users over time. Facebook recently surpassed MySpace in number of users. The growth of social networks is just super exponential.

Last night I got a quick peak under the covers of some popular Facebook apps at the Facebook Application Development meetup that was held at AOL.

The talks started with one on porting your Facebook app to Bebo given by Blake Commagere of Mogad, the programmer behind the Vampires, Werewolves and Zombie apps on Facebook. He gave a great talk that was clear and encouraging to all the developers in the room. The best part was all of the praise that he had for Steve Cohen and his platform development team at Bebo, who was in the audience to answer specific questions. Bebo has made it a point to parallel Facebooks application programming by using the same function names and call formats. But the latest announced changes to the application networking by Facebook may damage that. Bebo does not agree with many of the changes that Facebook has made to protect their users from unnecessary spam and other possible abuses.

Many of these “abuses” are designed by the programmer to help spread the application virally. According to what Blake has seen with his applications, Bebo is actually a better platform for spreading many applications. This idea was confirmed by Steve, who used an application called or provided by Gaia. It is a virtual world for the Bebo user’s avatars to roam in. Even though it does not have a viral way to spread built in, it is the fifth most popular app on Bebo.

Blake made an interesting point that I had never considered. Facebook is primarily about helping people to communicate with people in their groups. Bebo is primarily about self-expression. Since many apps on Facebook are about self-expression, they should do well if ported to Bebo.

Blake previous programming experience convinced him that the port from Facebook to Bebo would allow a programmer to keep about 90% of their original code. Porting to an OpenSocial platform like Orkut would result in the lose of 50% of the code. In general, he did not like the OpenSocial software, primarily because its documentation, even across several different social network platforms were very weak. Also he did not have kind words for Hi5’s developer effort. He said that their sandbox fails 75% of the time and that it has been a problem since May.

Blake thought that trying to make your application run simultaneously in Facebook, Bebo, and other social platforms was a bad idea. But the next speaker had products that did just that. Kyle Ellis of AOL UserPlane demonstrated a WebChat that worked across websites and social network.  These products are available white label. The cost depends on the number of channels and the max usage per month.

I like the talk given by John Smart of Zoosk. Their online dating site has a cross-platform app that works on many social networks. In his company’s case they used iFrames to hold their content. They had to do some fancy programming to prevent Facebook and other sites from timing out too quickly. I really need to get his slides. It was probably the most technical of the talks, but I really enjoyed seeing the nuts and bolts of the project from someone who did not sugar coat it.

RCR Wireless compiled together a great synopsis of the venture capital deals put together in the first quarter of 2008. Three things really pop out from this list.

1. The VC money is being distributed across the world, not just in Silicon Valley.

2. Large amounts of money are going to the usual hardware and chip companies, but a surprising amount of money is going into social networks.

3. There are just too many social networks being created. This boom is going to be followed by a bust for most of these sites.

I could be wrong about point 3. If you feel the world needs another social network, especially one focused mainly on the mobile space, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter.