Robert’s Rants & Rationalizations

Each year the World Economic Forum at Davos holds number of technology focused sessions. Last year I moderated a high profile discussion about the next digital experience. This year, Loic Le Meur is hosting a discussion on the growth of social networks.

Participants include Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, Greylock), Owen Van Natta (MySpace), Gina Bianchini (Ning), Evan Williams (Twitter) and George Colony (Forrester Research) and Don Tapscott (nGenera). Randi Zuckerberg, Jeff Jarvis, Russian super-investor Yuri Milner and others also dropped by to participate.

The room is packed, standing room only, and bursting at the seams. These guys are popular in Silicon Valley. Bring them to Davos, Switzerland and everyone wants to hear what they have to say.

Each panelist is giving a short 3-4 minute talk on how they frame the interesting issues around social networking (Hoffman says, for example, that privacy is only an issue for old people, young people don’t care.). We have videos of most of these comments and will embed them below as we process them..

Seven of the 15 most traffic sites in the world are social sites, Colony says in his intro. Only 17% of online users will visit a social site each day, though, including mobile usage. This varies widely by age – 27% of those 25 and under will visit a social site each day.

Below are clips from Hoffman, Van Natta, Bianchini, Williams and Zuckerberg:

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Dianne Annunziato is accusing a Dell technician of becoming a virtual peeping Tom during a support call by remotely turning on her webcam.

“First, the technician started asking me what time of day it was,” she said.

When she looked at her screen a minute later, Annunziato said she could see herself in a little box.

“He turned on the webcam; he never asked, ‘May I? Can I?’ Not a word, he just turned it on,” she said.

All I can say is, if I was in the woman’s place during this call, the technician would have seen some naked adult content regardless of the time of day. Fortunately, the Annunziato was wearing clothes, but she was quick to point out the problem with all of this to the technician’s supervisor.

“I said, ‘I could have been sitting here undressed,’ and the supervisor laughed, and I just sat there in shock,” she said.

So far, the technician’s side of the story has not been heard—but Dell claims that they are currently investigating the incident. [NBCdfw via Consumerist]

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