Jeremy believes: “Bloggers love to bitch about things.” And how! He opened the mic to the audience, asking for complaints about the current state of social software. The audience replied, claiming that there are too many social networks – and that much of the software is made for techies, and not the normal (“every day”) person. Jeremy asserted that we should be trying to get everyone involved in the social software scene – be they geek or not.

Some bulletpoints were recorded by a fellow Gnomedexer (thanks Arieanna):

• There is too much social software and the value of each one is being depleted
• Focus on why you use a service not how you use it or the features it has (don’t put the solution first)
• Connect services so they are not data islands
• We don’t look outside our own ecosystem to the real world
• We look down on other services (MySpace) and people because they are not in the A-list but rather the “mass” market
• We talk about users not people
• We argue too much about terminology (“buzz words”)
• We don’t know what regular people do at their computers (our assumptions suck, especially in software development)
• We need more non-geeks at ‘geek’ conferences
• When computer screen is not the only user interface – ‘think beyond the screen’

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Jeremy Zawodny is an employee for Yahoo! in the platform engineering group and has been described as “Yahoo!’s MySQL guru.” His popular blog, which he describes as “random throughts on technology, aviation, and life in general,” mostly covers the happenings inside Yahoo! (well, except the parts he can’t tell us that would get him fired)

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