The panel topic was loosely defined and the conversation tended gravitate toward Twitter and Twitter-like applications. Why Twitter? It gained huge popularity, resulting in performance problems, often leading to the surfacing of the beloved Fail Whale. It also attracts some of the biggest buzzwords of Web 2.0: social networks, information architecture, folksonomy (hash tag anyone?). In the end, Twitter has piles and piles of data – a lot of it is noise, but there is a method to the madness. The panel talked about the possibilities other applications like it mean to the Internet and to future people-oriented business.

Among others, I shared the panel with Jonathan Bryce, the co-founder of Mosso.com, now rebranded to The Rackspace Cloud and Robert Scoble, a Twitterer and FriendFeeder Extraordinaire!

The Rackspace team took a video of the panel, so check it out! (Warning: pretty big .mov file.) I already <3'ed Rackspace, as many of you know, but just in case, big props to Adrianna Bustamante and her team for the efficient nerd-wrangling! (Although I still got to mention robot overlords in the panel!)

Oh, and as for the question: “How do we make money from Twitter?” The answer is “Nobody knows, and even if they did, they sure aren’t going to tell you for free!”

• I still drive my first car: an awesome ‘92 Ford Crown Victoria, silver with stylish red vinyl on the inside. It caught on fire once but we put it out with a cup of coffee (the amazing part being convincing a Seattle native to surrender his coffee for any cause).
• I originally wanted to study math in college, but then I found a job at an Interwebs startup called ScreamingMedia, where I learned PHP (yay, .php3 files!). Eventually, I switched my major to computer science.
• I once worked at Amazon.com, on the Books/Music/Videos/DVD parts of the site where the QA department featured a real rocket scientist (she used to work for NASA).
• I know how to construct a trebuchet, use a blow torch and have built a small remote-controlled solar-powered car once.
• My first interaction with a computer was on a green screen, typing dir *.*
• I had a story published in The New York Times once (in the “Metropolitan Diary” column, but still!)
• I miss the tiled website backgrounds of the late 1990’s.

I am hereby tagging these individuals:

• Matt Purdon for always staying on top of new technology and never settling for comfort when coding.
• Cal Evans for always starting his day with a cheerful Twitter message.
• Paul Reinheimer for bringing the meat from America’s Hat.
• Ed Finkler for nicer web design than the rest of us combined!
• Brandon Savage for pointing out that I can’t count to 7!

These are the rules apparently:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some wierd.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.