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!”