MIX06: Vegas, baby!

First, eBay Web Services got a few nice mentions from Bill Gates in yesterday's opening keynote at the Microsoft MIX06 conference, including how eBay Web Services API's are great example of how to take advantage of a platform:

""eBay is an extreme example where half the product listings are done in a programmable way."

Then, Christin Boyd, author of the eBay/Outlook 2007 integration via eBay Web Services, and eight-year Microsoft vet, gave her own demo in a break out session, resplendent in Vegas attire. Why, even Elvis showed up to bid on items at the demo featuring eBay API integration.

And then here's Adam in front of a full house at the Web 2.0 Show me the money panel, with Jeremy from Yahoo!, Tim O'Reilly, TechCrunch and others.

Is there such a thing as having too much fun at a tech conference?

ETech 2006: next gen web community is worth our attention

Here is a sampling of the many interesting sessions on next Gen Web community last week at O’Reilly ETech 2006, themed around building the Attention Economy:

1) Derek Powazek's The New Community
http://powazek.com/etech06/

2) Amy Jo Kim's Putting the Fun in Functional: applying game mechanics to functional software
http://shufflebrain.com/etech06.htm

3) Clay Shirky's compelling Slashdot analysis, brilliantly simple Annoyingness v. Freedom community matrix, and “Shut up! No, *You* Shut Up”: A Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/etech_clay_shirky.html
http://social.itp.nyu.edu/shirky/wiki/

Winners of the eBay Developer Challenge 2006

Congratulations to our winners of the eBay Developer Challenge 2006!

We're down here in beautiful San Diego, CA with our Grand Prize and First Place winners, who won US $5,000 and US $1,000 respectively, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Grand Prize Winner: Unwired Buyer developed by Eric Smith (Developer gnumber2)
Calls you three minutes before an auction closes -- and lets you bid over your cell phone

First Place Winner: ctxbay by Aleksandar Stankovic (Developer astankovic79)
Analyizes Web page context and serves up contextual affiliate links to eBay.

Honorable Mentions:

1. Gumshoo by Craig Villamor (Developer auctionfigure1)
Remixes eBay data with the help of AJAX to provide a fresh interface to the marketplace
2. AuctionWatch GD by Ty Kroll (Developer tkrollwgg1)
Watch any eBay listing from your Google Desktop to always know the latest status
3. Auction Monitor by Christopher Wong (Developer freestuff60)
View your My eBay information using RSS, Yahoo! Widgets, and Apple Dashboard

ETech 2006: continuous partial attention

i'm down here in San Diego, CA at ETech 2006 through Thursday.

our DevChallenge Grand Prize and First Prize winners, Eric Smith and Alex Stankovic, got a nice mention today in the morning keynote from the O'Reilly emcee, Rael, (with a round of applause from the ETech crowd and everything!)

linda stone's talk today was worth my attention (one of the buzzwords here this year). one of the downsides to our society's relentless 24X7 connectedness through technology is our adaptive behavior towards continuous partial attention. nothing anymore, it seems, is worth the risk of giving our full attention in case we miss something important. she gave a rough timeline as follows:

1) 1965-1985: creating opportunity. self-expression, creativity, actualization of individuals. flip-side? narcissism, loneliness --> crave connection to others

2) 1985-2005: scanning for opportunity. 24X7 availability, connected to the network, hyper-communication. flip-side? artificial and inflated sense of constant crisis, overwhelmed, everywhere *except* where you are physically present. (blackberrying at meetings, mobile phone calls at family dinner)

3) 2005-?: discerning opportunity. in the attention economy, we will be seeking protection from overstimulous (proliferation of iPod headphones), use attention wisely, apps will improve quality of life use of time. flipside? TBD

As she gave this slide-less, demo-less talk, I peeked up from my laptop to witness her giving this talk in a sea of clicking laptops and mobile devices, and enjoyed being completely in and of this particular moment, giving my full attention to a collection of live human nodes on a common network of continuous partial attention.

the hair of the blog that bit you

Another gem from The Economist (the best publication in the world for international news & analysis) on companies such as P&G, Diebold and Netflix, who are managing corporate reputation/PR by acknowledging the power of blogging to gauge the seriousness of bad news.

Firms, such as BuzzMetrics (who has agreed to merge with Intelliseek) specialize in analysing blogs for business. These firms estimate there are about 27 million blogs online, which can be harnessed as another tool for companies to get a sense of customer satisfaction or common complaints about their products.

They even tracked down ex-CMPer Steve Rubel, of Micropersuasion fame, who recommends an intriguing "lockbox blog" concept for crisis corporate communication that is hidden behind an internet firewall, but can be made visible to the public at short notice.

In an age where disgruntled customers are more likely to blog about their experience than write a letter to the customer service department, companies can use the transparency of the Internet to uncover issues before they blow up into a crisis.

Consider it the "morning-after ramos fizz" approach to mitigating a PR hangover, rather than blogs just as a bitter pill to swallow.

what's new in the eBay Community Codebase?

a few very cool open source eBay developer and buyer tools, that's what.

1. project gdebaywatcher: Google engineer larrygadea1 (Larry Gadea) worked with technical evangelist Alan Lewis to open source the eBay Watcher plugin for Google Desktop and contribute it to the codebase. Developers can play around with the code from our first open source tool available for widespread distribution to eBay buyers, via Rate Limiting by eBay User ID
2. project ebatns: German developer intradesysdev001 (Carsten Harnisch) worked with Alex Schwinn and Bjoern Behrendt from eBay.de Developers Program to release the updated, unified schema compliant version of the eBay Accelerator Toolkit for PHP, for PHP4 or PHP5 - a developer tool for PHP developers building applications using eBay Web Services
3. project apireferencedocs: check out version 2.0 of the suite of tools that produces one of our developer favorites - the Input/Output reference documentation. John Darrow of our API Docs team collected input from developers from the Developer Forums for this version