Come here at 1pm eastern/10am Pacific to watch what Facebook has to say. A representative for the company says Facebook will explore a variety of topics including new tools and techniques, business growth strategies and open technologies.

 Scheduled Highlights (all times are PDT)

·         10:00 a.m.: Keynote and Opening Remarks

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO & Founder of Facebook

Bret Taylor, Director of Product

·         12:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.: Breakout sessions

·         4:30 p.m.: Closing Remarks

Chris Cox, Vice President of Product

Ethan Beard, Director of Facebook Developer Network

As you’re watching the keynote, feel free to leave us your comments about what is said.

The first part of the keynote was essentially a product demo for Spotify, and I can’t imagine that an hour of that would’ve kept people around (nothing against the service itself), but things got more interesting once it turned to more generalized conversation between the two on stage, about where digital music is going (if Spotify is in fact where it’s gong). 

Spotify is quite popular in Europe, but has some licensing issues to work out before it can work here in the U.S. Ek says there could be slight changes made to Spotify for an American release if that happens. They are working on the next generation of Spotify, and pre-install deals will likely be key for the service’s continued success. Ek says right now, you can go in and pick up a smartphone, it comes preinstalled with Spotify and you can get three to six months.

With the exception of the iPhone, most lack really good media players, says Ek. A lot of people use Spotify as a media player on Android/Nokia handsets, he says, and if you’re a BlackBerry user, you want it to work with that too. "We want to enable your library on all of these devices," says Ek. "We want to make music like water."

One of the more interesting parts of the keynote was when Van Buskirk took a question from someone on Twitter about Spotify’s advertising – something along the lines of if somebody listens to a lot of down-tempo music, will Spotify start filtering ads by mood?

He says they have targeting, and they continue to learn more about users, and more and more brands are discovering Spotify. "We’ve seen a lot of promising results with advertisers who have included artists," says Ek. He says click through rates have been 3, 4, and 5%. "If you look at traditional metrics, that’s super high."

As far as the question asked, Ek says, "that’s definitely something that we want to do."

You can figure out brand preferences, and if people are in the same demographic (like live in same place, listen to the same kind of music), they might get a different ad if they drive a BMW vs. an Audi, he says. He also says the ad model’s "getting better every month."

On another note, Ek thinks playlists are the new mixtape. With Spotify, among other services, they can be shared with others. Spotify users (of which there are seven million), he says, have a hundred million playlists, and about thirty percent of playlists are albums. "A lot of people say the album is dead," says Ek. "I disagree  – maybe pricing needs to be adjusted…"

All in all, the future of music delivery, according to Spotify, appears to be that users should be able to access their music libraries from virtually any device (through the cloud), share playlists with friends, and they can subscribe and/or get highly targeted advertising.

A lot of work remains to be done as far as making this all a universal reality, but in a nutshell (at least with Spotify), this seems to be the vision for what’s to come.

Either way, I’ll be liveblogging the keynote below. Please forgive the inevitable typos.

Williams will be interviewed by Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab."

Liveblogging starts

02:00:  Still waiting…

02:01: Introduction beginning…

02:03: Here we go…

Evan Williams announces…A new platform for integrating twitter into websites: it’s called @anywhere

Signin using twitter id, your own publications can be followed starting with amazon,huffpost youtube yahoo,….a bunch of others.

Umair asks – if i’m at newspaper and i want to read one of fav columnits

ev: @anywhere reduces friction – not strict rules lleaves alot of innovation up to devs and third parties…a lot to be done with it

easily tweet from column itself. you may just want to follow the columlnist….straight from byline

"one of the things we’ve found with twitter is discovery is one of the hardest challenges…"

twitter is very easy way to keep in touch.

Umair: what are key benefits to site?

ev: give you connection back to users that you didn’t hav before – twitter drives tons of traffic, so should reslt in more followers for a site than just sending out links…

hopefully result in more people who are your fans using twitter, talking about you content…

you can bring in users’ tweets into your site, and create a sub community with it

Umair: people and organizations build stronger relationships?

about lowering barrier to that according to Ev.

03:13: Ev: We’re still focused pretty much on how do we create the best experience for users and businesses…

How do we create a business out of this? There’s tons of business users on twitter today..

We just want to make that better, easier, and faster.

What is Twitter? Maybe the right question is what is twitter evolving to?

It’s always been a difficult question to answer. We think of it as an information network to help people discover what they care about (in the world)

You can follow the flaming lips if that’s what you care about….you can be smarter and make better choices…that’s valuable…

its like saying "what’s the internet?" it’s about who you are. what you need at the time.

02:16. As we grow, one of the things that becomes painful is having a lot of centralized decision making and forcing poeple through slow processes, so we have teams and try to give them the resources they need…

Role for interacting with teams?

I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of code…I personally like to get inovled in product and strategy…what we should be doing…the nitty gritty, work wth product teams. half my time. the other half think about company and right culture internally…

been thinking a lot lately about how to scale the company and adopt the characteristics we want…how to define these characteristics..paralllel between service and the company we want to create – openness big value of twitter . transparency. a company that behaves by that as well. easy to say and harder to do as you grow…

02:19 Openness means a lot of things. we debated whether openness or transparency is the right word. you can let people see what you’re doing, but a door lets people come in and mess with what you’re doing ..users have taken twitter and morphed it into what they want it to be. ….we’ve encouraged and supported that. a core part of being open.

Your basic assumptions are usually wrong. "Openness is a survival technique."

We talk about nine assumptions you should have one of them is assume there are more smart people outside the compay than inside. it’s a key thing to remember as you get bigger…

  02:21:   Deals with Bing/Google first guys we shared full stream of public twitter data with. a lot of debate…people inside twitter…if there’s all this data that could be highly moentizable., does it make sense to give this data away? We came to the decision by going to the principle by how do we create the most value for the user….the reason google/bing could help that – ther’es valuable knowledge within the twitter network. there’s a lot of valuable tweeting that people don’t necessarily see…it’s a way to bring more valuable to the tweets.

02:24: It was a tough decision to come to….big partners aren’t who they want to limit it too..announced a couple weeks ago that they would license the data to other partners…

One of the exciting next things to happen with the ecosystem …creating core experiences that fill holes in user expereince…sharing photos, shortening links, apps, etc.

Real businesses built off twitter – cotweet,etc. we know twitter can be used for customer support, but twitter.com interface isn’t built for that. cotweet recently got acquired who wants to focus on that more.

We’d love to see much more focus on creating those deep experiences.
 
"We’re pretty open." THere is some control we need to employ. if we were completly open, it could hur the users in time….it has to be managed a lot – being open and having an open api makes it much easier to build apps to spam twiter. sending cease and desists every day to spammers – using the twitter brand…

One reason third parties are so important – a lot of people falling for these guys’ tricks…we have to assert some kind of control.

02:29: An email i recently got…to support – someone in chile thanking twitter for helping communication…this is very gratifying for us because we’ve always held it important to make twitter reach the weakest signals in the world…because twitter’s so simple….sms still really important to us…

We’re really happy we’ve been able to get sms coverage…not as easy as just providing a service on the internet.

02:21: To me it comes back to is someone getting value out of twitter. if they’re search google and they come upon a tweet and get value out of a tweet, we consider them a user…ther is a curve for adoption. "we have a pretty wide definition of user." we’re trying to lower the barrier…at the beginning a lot of focus was on telling the world what you’re doing…now we’re getting to the point where there’s something interesting on twitter for almost everybody…mentions flaming lips again…critical that it’s a two way medium, but this could be as simple as a retweet or a reply…

02:35 Press secretary of the white house started using twitter in an authentic way from inside the white house in a way that you wouldn’t usually see things….official channel, but they’re using it in a new way. "very fun" to see.  It’s about reducing the walls beween people who have a lot of influence and the people they influence. That’s the most profound promise of the Internet, and we’re riding the wave I started on ten years ago with blogging…"

02:41: There’s more and more stuff every day you may want to follow and search for…our goal is not just to maximize that. We understand that people have limited time/attetion. We have no interest in increasing just the amount of time you spend on the Twitter site. "If anything, we’d like to decease it."

The open exchange of info has a positive impact on the world…

02:46: The obvious stuff will be just signing in and tweeting more stuff, but there’s another level of value created by lowering frition (@ platform)

If the channel helps the business get better, that tha’s very powerful.

02:49: If you live on the web, you’re used to having a relationship with companies/services you use..

A lot of people walked out of this keynote. I’m pretty sure the guy next to me fell asleep. No joke.

Bio from the SXSW Booklet: Valerie Casey works with start-ups, governments, and companies all over the world on challenges ranging from creating new products and services to transforming organizational processes and behaviors….She is the founder and executive director of Designers Accord.
 

Liveblogging starts:

2:05: Introduction begins…

2:07: Delighted to be here…..despite the fact the interactive community has been absent in conversation about sustainability…the commuinty will take the greatest leadership role moving forward…

Narrative

I find that a lot of the interaction designers are fixated on narrative and story telling ….you can take any story from film/literature/politics…and plot them on the axis of good fortune/ill fortune and time from beginnign to end

03:11: You can take any story from test to John Grishm, or Jennife Anniston…

Shows three different graphs.

Things you see in the news all the time – heart wrenchign pictures: child sitting in ewaste dumps

gives stats about these stories…horrific

Shows image of baby albatross, taken on midway where albatross mate…the finding of these babies…nothing has been done to them….the mothers were flyign out around the ocean to find food for their babies, and they mistook pieces of plastic for food and fed them to their children…grotesque…perverse to think about the effect we’re having on bio diversity…

political corruption….

Why does a salad cost more than a big mac (slide)

it’s because the usda – the food triangle supports one version of a recomendatino and the government does somthing entirely different…millions of dollrs through lobbyists going to meat and dairy….out of control agricultural indsutry…

Bizarre corruption between health and politics…

Burn pits in Iraq/Afghanistan….set up by gov. contractors like haliburton..

02:28: Shows picture of Haiti devastation – scientists linking natural disasters with climate change…

Talks about more political corruption….snowballing effect of sustainability

What are we supposed to do with all of that? "It turns out you don’t have to kill yourself."

Designers Accord to respond to doom and gloom…

bringing the creative community together, we can look at sustainability …bring optimism…there’s no one of us that can make real change by ourselves.we have to depend on collective wisdom.

personal accountability to colletive accountability.

Share my stories about not only my successes. industry ishellbent on successes….talk also about failurs nd compromises…thats what collective action is about.

Not just  a digital network….we have town hall meetings….i want the ability to ask questions…

Each week in case studies in fast company – tell the story of sustainaiblity…not about a checklist its about a constant struggle…

try to educate product/interaction/communiation designers, and architects…

School by Design initiative (open source)

try to think about taking sustainabilit out of ghetttoized….

639 design firm adopters, 33 educational adopters, 32 corporate adopters, 100 countries, six continents, all design disciplines

despite fact that media still talks about sustainabiliy in very green terms…

the truth is that the converstions become much more complex and interesting….

someties miss the point.

even if you’re in the interactive community…

02:26:  We have to recognize that there’s a consequence for everything we do.

I believe its the interactive community thats going to lead this movement next. thinking about systems problems

A system is more than the sum of its parts.

02:30: We cannot just focus on one part…it has to do with environmental, cultural, economic, etc.

Feedback delays plus bounded rationality equals design traps

Bounded rationality – i can only make decisions based on the knowledge right in front of me. barely looks at other groups or teams.. a design trap is when you design for the symptom rather than the problem – looks at dell studio hybrid. – I am a supporter of what dell is trying to do, but it’s a classic case. misses the point that we should not be designing another desktop computer…when will we stop thinking that less bad is good.

There is no such thing as a side effect.

Sometimes we arbitrarilly design what we’re resposnible for…global taco shed – students went to a taco truck and decided that each one of them would be responsible for tracing origin of ingredients..all for one taco had traveled over sixty four thousand miles….there’s this underlying movement that says local is better. global is bad….but what these students did is also discover that salt and cheese were local, avocados were from chile…they combatted the idea of the polarity between global and local by looking at embodied energy in each ingredient. they learned a lot when comparing them.

02:36 Creating the right measurement of success

The Gross National Product 

U.S. indicator of prosperity – but that indicator has nothing to do with health and wll being  and relationships. out of sync…all sorts of inconsistencies

 02:40 Selecting the correct lever for change

IN systems thinkng – people identify the wrong thing to change when theyr’e trying to change something.

mythology is all about lone inventor and silver bullet – they don’t really exist….we continue that mythology and we need to change the rhetoric we use…

Talks about Naked Pizza…

02:44 The priority is to use the scale of concept to tackle people on their own turf…

what is the lever we use? the counter-intuitive one ?

Enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between structure and behavior…

She says she’ll tweet references for all the stuff she’s talking about….probably a good idea to check those out if you’re interested….(to understand her points better)

02:47 No difference between a structure and the behavior that comes from it. when a new president comes in and you have all these hopes for change, and nothign really changes…its because the structure hasn’t really changed

02:48: Talks about HUB…

02:49 Issue – attention cycle : degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action

Rising of public awareness about a problem…when the public starts to get greata attention around an issue, there’s actually a point where the degree of product action is inversely correlated…

When you get a couple of hundred thousand people interested in a topic it has a tranquilzing effect…people think i don’t need to do anything because there’s already so many people doing it…

people believe someone else is looking after it.

A system is a collection of elements and interconnections that ar e highly organized to achieve an overall goal or purpose

if you change the purpose of a system you can effect change….

the interactive community is the one to do it we are architects and product designers and communicators all wrapped into one.

How can we change the narrative? What would happe if your purpose was oriented toward cultural sustainability instead of commerce? 

What if social media was actually about social impact?

The interactive community is the connecting tissue…