Not at SXSW? How I attended Virtually Day #3

Yesterday was Day 3 at SXSW Interactive and since I could not be there I decided to follow all the excitement virtually by reading associated hashtags for presentations that were of interest to me. I also blogged about Day 1 and Day 2.

Yesterday I followed two presentations:

1. Gmail: Behind the Scenes
2. My Life, Take Two: The Right to Delete

Gmail:Behind the Scenes (#gmailbehindscenes)

Presenters (click name to see Google Profile):
Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager Google
Braden Kowitz, User Experience for Google Ventures
Edward Ho, Technical Lead for Buzz - @Ho
Jonathan Perlow, Software Engineer for Gmail Frontend

Todd Jackson, Product Manager for Gmail and Buzz - @toddj0

The key message from this presentation was when Todd Jackson said "You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella." What he meant by that in a company like google where ideas are constantly being thrown around, the product managers must manage distractions and protect the engineers from them.

Team Approach - Edward Ho, Techinical Lead for Buzz, discussed the need for meetings to be about demos and execution. Their work space for Buzz was created in an open layout so that they can bounce ideas off one another while at their workspace instead of getting up for meetings all the time.

Organic Growth - Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager, is in charge of the Gmail blog and discussed PR strategies and how organic growth has been their bread and butter in terms of getting products used by people. Most of the time they will not announce that a service is being launched because people want to start using it right away. However, they will announce when they are working on fixing issues so that users know it is being worked on.

They also discussed the feature in Labs called "undo send" which stopz messages from being sent for a few seconds after you hit send.  This feature was actually debated for two years before being implemented by an engineer in Japan. I think this is a cool feature and I have used it but it should allow you to undo send up until the point before the recipient has opened it. A few seconds doesn't give you very much time to realize your mistake sometimes.

Update: Michael Yingling commented on buzz that you can not use this feature if the message was sent to a non-google server. Thx Michael for the info!

Detailed information about the presentation can be seen at William Hertling's Support 2.0 Blog: Notes from Gmail Behind the Scenes Presentation.

My Life, Take Two: The Right to Delete (#mylifetaketwo)

Presenters:
Marc Davis, Co-Founder of Invention Arts - @marcedavis
Annalee Newitz, io9.com - @AnnaleeN
Chris Conley, ACLU of Northern California (@ACLU_NorCal)
Elly Jonez, elly.org - @Le
Andrew McLaughlin

The panelists discussed the challenges in regulatory frameworks and the need to create an infrastructure for people to aggregate their own data and exchange it. Chris Conley is part of the ACLU Northern California digital privacy team. Most of the information I found online were points made by Marc Davis.

Main points made by Marc Davis:
-We are in the early phases of a digital economy/digital society where we can infer a lot about people based on bits of data they leave online. People don't realize how much data they are sharing
-Commercial entities are making a lot of money from your query searches and data entries
-Data is a form of asset - the right to delete is about privacy but also about how businesses operate in the future
- Need to create a user centric framework where you own and have rights to control the data that you produce. You would then have the ability to make money from sharing your data. Creating a user data banking exchange would foster economic growth
-Way to solve this problem will be a combination of social/technical/economical innovation

How to solve this problem now:
Step 1 - Look at how your data is being used. Check your privacy settings
Step 2 - Read the terms of service and understand what you are agreeing to

Andrew McLaughlin brought up a good point: You might have thre right to delete something if you posted the info but what about when someone else does? - This makes me think of Facebook and how frustrating it is that people can just post photos of you that you can't remove (unless you ask them kindly).

Elly Jonez talked about how it is important to be able to reinvent yourself and delete your personal info online

You can also get more information on Marc Davis' thoughts by viewing his interview with WebProNews.

Feel free to leave comments about what presentations you want me to follow today and tomorrow. I look forward to your feedback.