Not surprisingly, this session was pack doesn't hurt that Charlene Li of Forrester is moderating. It also doesn't hurt to have some of theed. The busiest of any of the sessions I've seen so far. It biggest names in social networking i.e. FaceBook, LinkedIn, Ning and Yahoo! In general, this was a strong session. A solid B+ in terms of providing insight and new ideas.

Following are a list of Q&A's from Charlene Li to the panel:

Charlene: How do you make money off Social Networks without polluting the community?

Gina/Ning: with niche, focused social networks, you can monetize them with sponsorships.

Reid/LinkedIn: Create value for users -- once your social network hits critical mass, you can look to add marketing or advertising to monetize. If you're overly focused on monetizing your social networking, you probably won't scale fast enough. "Be focused on distribution".

Charlene: how does Yahoo! compete with some of the upstarts like Facebook and LinkedIn in the social networking space?

Mike/Yahoo: Yahoo! is in the game with Yahoo Groups and Flickr in spite of Yahoo 360 not being as successful as we hoped it would be.

Charlene: what happens if MSN, Yahoo!, AOL get their act together? How do the Nings, FaceBooks and LinkedIns of the world compete as a smaller players?

Ross/LinkedIn: Companies can only have 5 priorities at a time. Is social networking really a top five priority for the big three? (according to Mike at Yahoo, it is in fact in the top five)


Other insightful comments from the panel:

Gina/Ning: there is a blueprint for where social networks are going. Look at Compuserve and online services and how they exploded when the Web was born.

Mike/Yahoo: I believes were at a similar point with social networks to where search was in 1997. We still have a HUGE opportunity for both large and small players.

Gina/Ning: the freedom to create for smart people that don't know how to code is now here with Web 2.0 tools.

Reid/LinkedIn: it takes the same amount of blood sweat and tears to build a small business as a big business. So if that's the case, shoot for biggest possible goal. Think YouTube vs. $5-10M.

Gina/Ning: social networking is like a party. Customers want lots of things to do, lots of people to meet. It's important for people to have new and interesting things all the time.

A side note to the panel discussion -- after the talk was over, there were literally 150 people that came up to the podium to talk with the speakers. It may have had something to do with Reid of LinkedIn mentioning that he sometimes did angel investing. As another side note, I met Jeremiah Owyang of Podtech who was doing a video blog of the session. He is videoing a number of the sessions and his content can be found on his blog called Web Strategist.