Under the Radar Recap

Ross Mayfield posted a brief overview of last night’s Under the Radar event. Paul Joyce, a coworker of mine, also did on Spoke’s company blog.

The event was pretty interesting. Overall it was a bit light on the deep issues, which isn’t a surprise given the very limited time.

One interesting part of the debate happened when Esther Dyson has asked the questions of how do you not let people know you are ignoring them, and how do you prevent people from “spamming” you. Ben (Spoke’s CEO) and Reid (LinkedIn’s CEO) both tried to explain it in the limited time, both only semi-successful given the 15 seconds they had to respond.

Privacy is a big issue and is hard to explain. In fact, the issues Esther raised are addressed by both Spoke and LinkedIn and probably most of the social networking software (save Friendster, which I’ll discuss later). In my (most likely biased) opinion, Spoke does privacy better than the other guys out there, but we’re facing a huge challenge of getting that point across.

Oh, and Ross I swear Spoke didn’t have half the audience, it was more like 1/10th