Darren Straight's Blog

ICT Enthusiast and photographer.

By - Darren Straight

Review of The First Great Facebook Debate

Yesterday evening I attended The Great Facebook Debate at the BT Centre in London. That of which was being filmed live – you can watch the webcast here.

The Schedule was as follows: 
17:00 – 17:15 – Registration
17:15 – 18:00 – Networking
18:00 – 18:15 – Welcome from the Host, Paul Walsh.
18:15 – 18:35 – Panel Presentations (setting the scene)
18:35 – 19:00 – Q&A with Panel (turn up the heat)
19:00 – 20:15 – Debate (is it me or is it getting hot in here?!)
20:15 – 21:00 – Networking
21:00 – till late – After-party @ The Livery – thanks to Trusted Places!

Registration
I Arrived a little earlier than 5pm for registration, 4:25 to be precise, only to be told that they were still setting up and that they were kicking off at 5pm, of course I was a little confused as I’m sure it said 4:30pm on the web (checked the internet on my mobile and I was right), anyhow I was invited to take a seat and wait or come back later. So what I decided to do was to do a little bit of walking – quite glad I did actually as I came across a section of The Old Roman London Wall near the Musseum of London.

At 5pm I returned to find a queue of people registering! 🙂

Networking
Networking was good along with the food and drinks! 😀

Welcome
Nice little introduction from Paul Walsh on what The Great Facebook Debate is all about and in 30 seconds what BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) is all about.

Panel Presentations
Paul Walsh – Chair
JP Rangaswami – The significance of us having this conversation
Chad Wollen – Making money from Facebook
Hugh MacLeod – Changing how we communicate

Q&A with Panel
Various questions thrown towards the panel!

Debate
Rules of engagement – Oli Barrett, Moderator.

There were 3 Motions which were as follows, though we had to all vote on which one we didn’t want as we could only have two motions go through for debate.

Motion 1 This house believes; Facebook should be banned from corporate networks

  • For: Sam Setih & Damien Mulley
  • Against: Robert Loch & Josie Fraser against

Motion 2 This House believes that Facebook’s decision to open up its platform to all developers was a mistake

  • For:  Josie Fraser and Robert Loc
  • Against: Sam Sethi and Damien Mulley

Motion 3 This house believes that friend requests from your boss are best ignored

  • For: Sam Sethi and Damien Mulley
  • Against:  Josie Fraser and Robert Loch

The motions choosen were “Motion 2 – This House believes that Facebook’s decision to open up its platform to all developers was a mistake and “Motion 3 – This house believes that friend requests from your boss are best ignored

I think as do many others who attended that the motions brought up some interesting conversations along with some laughs but that they didn’t really focus on things we didn’t already know or could have worked out for ourselves. It would have been nice for there to be more talk about how we can monetize facebook and some more talk about privacy and where do we think Facebook is heading next along with conversations such as should facebook stop trying to expand before it’s turns into a myspace site instead of what facebook was originally intended for.

Networking 2
More chance to do some networking with drinks from BT! 🙂

After-party @ The Livery
Yet another time to do some more networking – with drinks sponsored by Trusted Places – when me and Kevin (University Student I meet at the Future of Web Apps the other week) first arrived at the Bar there were not many people there yet – so we decided to take a walk around the block and come back in a bit and see if anything was happening yet, this time round there were some more people I remember seeing from the debate, including Alex Tew (http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/) – got my self some pixels on his site when it first went live before the media went crazy about it – there were still pixel corner spaces available at this time! 🙂

Conclusion…
In overall the debate was pretty interesting in the fact that it had a different format, that being instead of the usual presentations and questions and answers at the end. However it certainly does need some tweaking in places which is expected considering it was the first one so well done Paul and everyone else for a great time! 🙂

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4 thoughts on “Review of The First Great Facebook Debate

Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » The guilt of not being fluffy October 19, 2007 at 12:31 pm

[…] trip to London. I’ll get back to doing fluffy links next week. Here’s a review of the Facebook debate. Last post in the Rigging the Election series goes out today at 1413. I’ve gotten some VERY […]

Damien Mulley October 19, 2007 at 10:18 pm

Great summary. Say hello to me next time. Be nice to chat.

The Facebook Debate – some thoughts October 29, 2007 at 12:18 am

[…] not much I can add to the many reviews of the debate itself,  so, in a fit of madness sanity, I am going to abbreviate it […]

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