Moderator: Chris Brogan, VP, Strategy & Technology, CrossTech Media
Panelists: Matthew Adkisson, Co-founder, FreeCause.com; Norris Boyd, Engineering Manager, Google; C.C. Chapman, Partner, The Advance Guard; Ann Glenn, Senior Web Producer, Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive; Rob Larsen, Principal Engineer, Presentation, Cramer

Why build a social application? Developers are looking to kick-start a company or build something fun and viral. Marketers are searching for ways to appropriately target an audience for their products and services. Regardless of the motivation, with 6,000 social applications on Facebook alone, this is not a technology that is going away anytime soon. But, ultimately, what is the point?

Social applications and widgets can be more than fun add-ons to the social networking platforms. They can be useful tools combining collaboration and professional business applications so much so that B2B companies like Oracle and Salesforce.com are in the process of developing their own social applications.

Do you want to build an application on top of one of the most powerful platforms? What are the keys to success? How do you get your application adopted and how can you turn it into a successful business enterprise?

Topics for discussion:

• Closed API vs. Open API
• Open Social vs. Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Microsoft and Second Life
• Keys to successful distribution
• Monetization
• Going beyond member profiles, the social graph and member activities
• Next Steps: What are the social applications after social networks?

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