Yes, you read that right.  Your best friend from high school may not be allowed to influence U.S. economic policies, but his opinion on a few issues could at least be conveyed to some very important people. 

Rodney Rumford reports, "Facebook is partnering with the World Economic Forum 2009.  For the first time ever, Facebook will be running real-time ‘polls’ during a select group of panels . . . .  [P]olls will appear in News Feeds of a randomly-generated set of people from Facebook’s 150 million user base, and will ask questions like, ‘Which renewable energy source is most promising?’ and, ‘If you lost Internet connectivity for an extended period, would there be vitally important data you’d leave behind in the cloud?’"

Then, "Facebook users’ responses to the polls will be viewed live during the discussion forum, enabling the Davos audience to get a real-time pulse on what millions of people around the world are thinking and feeling."

This promises to be an interesting move; Davos attendees will receive instant feedback even as Facebook is likely to see a surge in traffic.  Meanwhile, MySpace and YouTube are getting in on Davos in their own way, too.

1. Tim O’Reilly and Richard Edelman talk to me about the future of advertising. Tim runs O’Reilly Publishing and did the first advertising on the Internet. Edelman runs the largest independent PR firm in the world.

2. Marcel Reichart, who was on O’Reilly’s panel about future of advertising, talks more about future of advertising. He runs the DLD conference, an influential conference in Munich that got raves, among other things for Burda Media. Then Linda Abrahams, executive vice president from Comscore joined us.

3. Michael Dell about joining the Red campaign.

4. Must watch. Emery Brown, who does computational neuroscience at Harvard, and Cynthia Braezel joins us who does robotics at MIT. Really smart people. You can read more about Cynthia’s social robot here. Emery is doing research into anaesthesiology. You can read more on Harvard’s sleep medicine page about Emery. At about 10 minutes an incredible professor joined the conversation without being prepared. That was Hugh Herr who runs the biomechatronics group at MIT’s media lab. He is working on building new prosthesis for people who’ve lost limbs and you can read more about him here.

5. Must watch. Rick Warren runs the largest church in the United States and has one of the most popular books ever printed (other than the bible): “the Purpose Driven Life.” I was surprised by meeting him, doesn’t come across as conservative and is a guy I probably would enjoy having a beer with. Part I and Part II. Part II is the one I’d watch, it’s about 10 minutes long. Walter Issaacson walks into the interview along with a famous author of Time Magazine (he was editor of Time and ran CNN, along with the LA Olympics).

6. Jimmy Wales, the guy who runs Wikipedia jumped unexpectedly into a longer video at about 18 minutes through this video.

7. Ellen Langer talks to me about her work. In a second part, Mike Arrington and Ellen Langer, who is the first female tenured psychology professor at Harvard, have a five-minute chat (a movie is being made about her and she schools Arrington after he brags that he has more Google hits than she does).

8. Bono records a video for YouTube. “Sorta a rockstar.”

9. Robert Shriver, head of Red Campaign talks to me about what Red is. You can read more about Robert Shriver on Wikipedia.

10. Must watch. Eric Hippeau, managing partner at SoftBank Capital, talks to me about what he’s seeing in the markets (he’s an investor in Huffington Post, among others). He used to be CEO of ZiffDavis and you can read more about him on SoftBank’s site. We are talking about the downturn in the market while waiting in line to get into a talk.

11. William Amelio, CEO of Lenovo about notebooks and other devices.

12. Must watch. Vinod Khosla on investments he’s making to help retard climate change.

13. John Gage, lead researcher at Sun Microsystems talked about some of the things he’s been involved in at Sun (Java, et al). He’s one of the original employees at Sun and you can read more about him on Wikipedia. He was hanging out with Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate in Economics.

14. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, talks to Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic and me about blogging and Web services. Later in the recording Tim Weber of the BBC joins us at about 11 minutes in.

15. Susan Sawyer of the Huffington Post talks to me about what she’s writing about.

16. danah boyd, social software researcher, talks to me about the sessions she attended on first day and then explained the research she’s doing. At two minutes in they turn the camera around where you get to see me in my tie. Ouch. At three minutes she explains her dissertation that she’s working on.

17. Adrian Monck tells me about YouTube’s “Davos Question.” Adrian is a famous journalist and now teaches journalism and heads City University’s world-renowned Department of Journalism and Publishing in the UK. More on Adrian on Wikipedia.

18. Matthias Lufkens, head of PR for the World Economic Forum, drops in for a quick report on the first day’s events.

19. Tariq Krim, founder and CEO of Netvibes, shows me the latest private beta of Netvibes, which looks damn good.

20. Nick of Reuters talks to me about what they are doing in Second Life and then we meet Phillip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs, the folks who make Second Life.

21. Yossi Vardi talks to me about what happened at his Shabbat breakfast.

22. The closing concert by the Bern Symphony Orchestra.

Lots of interesting people and I wish I could have done more video. It was an amazing week and of 3,000 people there it’s too bad that I couldn’t have gotten everyone in front of my camera.

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Yesterday morning I woke up early. Was sitting in the hotel lobby at 7 a.m. trying to check email when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Mark Zuckerberg, founder/CEO of Facebook, which now has 68 million active users (people who’ve signed on in the past 30 days).

He invited me to a breakfast with Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf. We walked together to the breakfast, which was interesting because of Musharraf’s comments, where he defended his administration. After the breakfast Mark and I spent a bunch of time together, where he gave me permission to quote him.

Aside: I owe this interview to Lance Knobel, who writes the Davos Newbies blog (he used to work for the World Economic Forum and knows the Davos event inside and out). I met with him before coming to Davos and he told me to wake up early every morning and go to as many breakfasts as I could get to. If you ever get a chance to come to Davos you should look up Lance. Another great thing I’ve done is hanging out with Mike Arrington in the YouTube booth (Google graciously let me blog in their booth, which is where I’m writing to you now. Arrington has a post up about what has been happening here in the YouTube booth the past few days. A shout out too to the Forbes blogging crew who has been doing an awesome job from the same area. Here’s a video I filmed in the booth explaining how I got to Davos — while filming the video Bono, Tony Blair, and the Japanese Prime Minister walked past).

Anyway, back to Zuckerberg.

It will forever be one of the highlights of my life just walking alone through the streets of Davos with him.

I asked him why he doesn’t like going on video and seems to have difficulty dealing with the press and bloggers. He said he was shy. Asked me not to video him “I freeze up,” he told me. He did promise to meet more with bloggers and to give me a video interview when he’s back home.

It was an amazing admission.

But it was far from the only thing I learned about Mark. Over the three hours he demonstrated to me just how smart he was (Linden Labs founder, Phillip Rosedale, joined us at one point and they instantly broke into a discussion that switched back and forth between a pretty technical discussion of architectures and things they’ve both learned by scaling up businesses to millions of users. Zuckerberg said that Facebook makes a lot of use of memcache to get better performance and that they’ve built a lot of custom code for MySQL, which they’ve donated back to the community) and why he’s seen as one of the most interesting business leaders of our time. Talked with me about how his management team works, how he’s working to keep a unique culture, and gave me lots of details about what is coming this year in Facebook.

I also got a chance to watch him as he dealt with world leaders at a Newsweek lunch and came away impressed with his social graces. I wish I had his poise and skills and I’m almost twice his age.

One of the things that I hope to get him to tell me on camera is his descriptions of the people who work for him — it was a side of him that I haven’t yet seen displayed outwardly. It’s clear he has deep respect for the people who work with him. If there was a part of him that inspired me, that was it. Leaders usually are pretty good about sharing their strategy, but it’s a rare corporate leader who tells me interesting stories about his employees and the work that they do and work to share credit with other people.

Some things he shared with me about Facebook?

1. They are within weeks of shipping translated versions of Facebook. He wondered just how much faster Facebook would have grown if they had had translated versions sooner. He told me that they had traded off working on that to work instead on keeping up with the huge growth they had seen. He believes that much of Facebook’s growth this year will come from non-English-speaking regions.

2. They are working on a major overhaul of the application platform. Both to make apps less spammy and also to deliver much more functionality so more apps move beyond the viral, but pretty low feature, styles of apps.

3. They are still thinking about data portability and just how that will work to both protect users as well as to encourage new kinds of applications to be built. He explained to me that the kind of script that I was running is often used by spammers to send tons of messages to users and that’s something they are really working to protect their users against. On the other hand, he understood the kinds of apps that I wanted to have as a user. When Rosedale was sitting with us, I pointed out that I’d love to see when Facebook users are active on Second Life. That would require opening up the social graph to new kinds of data sharing that Facebook isn’t yet allowing. But he didn’t yet have answers as to just what Facebook will allow in the future.

4. I told him that Facebook’s messaging capabilities was both cool but also very limiting. Cool because, unlike my email, there isn’t spam. Limiting because I can’t join more people into a conversation thread after it starts. He told me that Facebook will see major changes in its architecture that would allow outside developers to build new capabilities in major parts of its service, which will help Facebook to see the features that I want to have. This is a sizeable shift in strategy for Facebook and one that is a great message for outside developers to see. One of the fears I hear is that developers are worried that Facebook will steal/copy their work and build popular apps or features itself. Zuckerberg told me that overtime it’ll be clear that the reverse will prove to be true.

5. He talked to me about his love of Scrabulous and was hopeful that a good resolution will come. Hasbro has been threatening the two developers of Scrabulous. I told Zuckerberg that it was clear that Hasbro had a case that its intellectual property was being infringed on (Scrabulous is an online version of Hasbro’s Scrabble, which pretty clearly infringes on copyrights and trademarks of Hasbro’s). Zuckerberg agreed that that was the case, but told me that Hasbro does see the value in getting a new online community built on its behalf. He thinks there may be an acquisition or other good outcome to the dispute.

6. I wondered if we’d see the ability to share photos and videos with the public internet. He said that they were working on better granularity on Facebook’s privacy features, which would allow such things, but that it’s tough to take some things into public light because Facebook’s features rely so much on tagging and other content from its members, some of whom might not want those details shared publicly. He expects Facebook to move cautiously in those areas.

7. Facebook has a limitation on the number of friends a person can have, which is 4,999 friends. He says that was due to scaling/technical issues and they are working on getting rid of that limitation. Partly to make it possible to have celebrities on Facebook but also to make it possible to have more grouping kinds of features. He told me many members were getting thousands of friends and that those users are also asking for many more features to put their friends into different groups. He expects to see improvements in that area this year.

8. He admitted to me that he had made mistakes in how they implemented Beacon and explained it. Watch for him to come back with a new Beacon and a much better explanation.

9. He admitted to me that he had made mistakes in how he communicates with the Facebook community. I asked him why he only blogs when the community has a negative reaction to something that Facebook does. he says that’s a mistake and that he’ll work on being more transparent and open with his communications. He also will encourage his team to work closer with bloggers, journalists, and members of the Facebook community to build better relationships so that problems can be discussed more openly. I urged him to change how Facebook deletes accounts from people who break the rules and to put in place more process for people to appeal deletion decisions.

One last thing. This post sounds fawning, I know. But Zuckerberg demonstrated to me that he is, indeed, the real deal and that the hype he’s gotten over the past year has largely been deserved. He definitely won me over.

Imagine what’ll he get done when he gets over his shyness.

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Hey, I am a sucker for a good name drop. But I take you further than just writing a blog post saying something like “I met Vinod Khosla.”

I turned on my cell phone and let you interview him and others.

The BBC caught me doing this and wrote me up.

Here are the videos I did today.

1. Eric Hippeau, managing partner of SoftBank Capital. Talked with me about investments he has made. Lots of content plays like Huffington Post.

2. William Amelio, CEO of Lenovo USA. Showed me Lenovo’s latest laptops and MID device.

3. Vinod Khosla. One of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capitalists. Talked with me about cement. Oh, and a few other things he is passionate about (green investing).

4. Daniel Shapiro, talked with me about conflict resolution. He is a professor at the Havard Law School and works with governments around the world to try to decrease violence and increase democracy.

5. John Gage, chief researcher at Sun Microsystems. Talked with me about helping people in Africa.

6. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, talked with me about trends he is seeing. Loic Le Meur popped in for the conversation and later Tim Weber of the BBC joined in, where he was amazed at the interactivity and questions he got from around the world.

7. Susan Sawyer, writer for the Huffington Post drops in for a chat.

8. John Markoff, senior tech writer for the New York Times and David Kirkpatrick, senior tech writer for Forbes, talk with me about the impact of economic turmoil on tech.

9. Danah Boyd, who is writing a dissertation on her social software research, talks with me about social networking trends she is seeing among teens.

10. Adrian Morick talks with me about the Davos Question, which is the YouTube project that the World Economic Forum is working on to get people around the world to answer how they would change the world.

11. Matthias Leufkins, head of PR for the World Economic Forum, talks with me about what he is seeing on the first day.

12. Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, starts the morning out with a fun chat.

13. Tariq Kim, CEO of Netvibes, gives me a sneak peak at the new version of Netvibes, which looks very compelling.

14. Phillip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs, says hi along with Nic from Reuters.

More tomorrow at www.qik.com/scobleizer

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Keep in mind that when you see me on my Twitter account I’m actually sending live video and you can ask questions while we film. It’s really incredible to be able to do that and I thank Qik for giving me several cell phones to get lots of video up. The forum has just started (it’s 10 a.m. in the morning here) and I’m meeting incredible people and will bring more to you as I can. Places to watch:

1. My Twitter account. It gets a message every time I start a Qik video. My videos are also posted to the Davos Qik account#.

2. My Qik account. I post videos here frequently.

What are the CEOs talking about? The “economic turmoil” (which is what Matthias Leufkins, head of PR for the World Economic Forum, called it).

The Web 2.0 bloggers are talking about Automattic’s latest investment. Congratulations to Matt Mullenweg and team (they are the ones who produce the blogging software I’m using to type to you here).

Josh Spear is hanging out here too and blogging. So is Mike Arrington.

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