All comments are approximate quotes, but I think they accurately convey the meaning of the speaker.

Joshua Porter's presentation
Porter provides some ideas for promoting good behavior on your social site:
* Encourage sharing information. Like noting real names on Amazon, feedback on eBay.
* Provide recognition for good behavior. Like top diggers on Digg.com, which has since been removed. Burka adds: It made sense when we had a small audience and it wasn't clear how to be a good user. As community grew, top diggers list became a game, very competitive to small group of users. So we ended up taking it down. Recognition works better when it comes from the group.
* Show causation. Let everyone know how your apps work. Netflix is a great example: They show you EVERYWHERE how rating movies helps you get better recommendations. And it benefits Netflix....more you rate, better they work. Burka: They show you, instead of giving you lots of instructions. Messina: Pandora's also like that.
* Leverage reciprocity. When you give people something, they have an urge to reciprocate. Example: LinkedIn. When you give someone a recommendation, they feel compelled to give you one back. Sieling: Strong link between showing causation and that reciprocal effect. Causation needs to be obvious to encourage the reciprocal effect.

Porter: Many features are good but then may have a threshold where the group usability begins to deteriorate [like top diggers].

Daniel Burka's presentation
Burka talks about privacy issues related to social sites. He didn't understand the metaphor of the wall on Facebook when he first started. First joined, got lots of messages from his friends on his wall....then deleted them because he'd read the messages. Didn't understand until later that he was exhibiting very antisocial behavior.

A graph of sites from private to public....Basecamp on one end, and Pownce. Easy to tell who can see your stuff....only the people you let see it. Digg, GetSatisfaction - Everything you do is public. In the middle: Flickr, Facebook. You have to be clear about where your site stands so people are comfortable, particularly in the middle of the spectrum where some things are public and some aren't.

What are the hot point privacy issues for your users?
* Online identities. Images, names. Depending on the goal of the site, you will handle these in different ways. Requiring real names? Do you want people to find each other?
* Friends. Do other people get to see a user's friends? Interesting point: When you meet someone in real life, you don't get to meet all their friends at the same time. [My question: But when you meet online, you miss lots of markers that you see in real life...perhaps sharing things like your resume, your friends, your website, substitute for characteristics that we pick up on in person.]
* Make it clear what's public.
* Activity. Do you show their activity to anyone? To friends? Or just to the user? This is where Facebook's Beacon ran into trouble....people thought the information being pulled in from third party sites to the FB news feed was intrusive and not intuitive. They didn't expect that to happen. Sieling: Buying movie tickets isn't a public act, so you don't expect it to show up on your FB feed. Digging a story is already a public act, so you expect people to see that you did it.

Adding controls...but don't create feature creep.
Burka also says, so to protect privacy, you have to build in controls. Common crutch: People come up with cool feature ideas, but then there are privacy concerns, so someone says, let's just make it a preference. That's dangerous....once you reach a threshold, people don't understand their options, and then they have no control. Messina: How do you control it? As you grow, how do you add value without creating feature overload? Burka: A lot of complex features are of specific interest to a very niche group of people. So maybe you can put it under the hood, and as a user becomes more confident and integrated, you can take advantage of advanced features. Porter: Like Facebook has divided the profile page to address profile overload.

Burka says, transparency therefore is critical. On Pownce, you see exactly who can see each post. On public posts, very clear that everyone can see what you're doing. Sometimes that becomes complex. You can see who dugg this....

Todd Sieling's presentation
Sieling talks about how spam is bad in social networks. Social media, APIs, etc. are spam heaven. Says 70-80% of new accounts on ma.gnolia and many other sites are spam. Yowza.

Methods spammers are using on ma.gnolia:
* Spammer has a site, and creates many accounts pointing to it. Makes it look popular.
* Take a couple of legit looking links, and add a bunch of spam at the end.
* Joe SEO: Spammers get people to create profiles full of junk, a sort of get rich quick scheme.
* You can't fool me...spend a lot of time making a real profile. Copy and paste from other profiles. Then their bookmarks are all spam.
* People import massive lists of spam bookmarks.

Hard to deal with because spammers often take advantage of features that are also useful to the greater community. So you can't remove those features.

What hasn't helped:
* Adding no-follow reference. Tells Google to ignore destination of the link. Too many sites don't apply no follow, or spammers are not doing it just for the page rank in Google.
* Akismet. It's been great for Wordpress. Ma.gnolia applied it at the account level. But then found that people who'd used a few legit links threw Akismet totally off and they had to do a lot of human work to evaluate spam.
* Weeding on sight. When admin sees a spam account, click to hide it.
* Recaptcha. Ineffective b/c spammers are paying people in developing economies pennies to spam and they can fill in captcha boxes.

What's working:
* No 100% win
* Created "gardeners" -- volunteer admins
* New accounts start off gray, and get whitelisted after they've been evaluated.

Gardeners are community admins who evaluate account usage. Their motive is altruistic....creating a better community. They can appoint new gardeners. Porter: I haven't met anyone who's truly altruistic. Why do people submit reviews to Amazon or restaurant review sites? People's first answer sounds altruistic...but then they'll say, I like to get more people reading my profile. It's really about recognition.

Sieling: There is public recognition for gardeners, but people using the site are getting lots of info for themselves, so being a gardener improves the information that you see on the site, too.

Hahaha. Sieling showed a profile of a gardener named Alex Jones....who now comes to the mic to comment. He says, altruism is part of it, but I feel a sense of ownership of the site, too. I want to keep info on the site of good quality, and it gives me a way to give back to the service that's been valuable to me.

Great panel....no one wanted to leave but the SXSW peeps kicked us out.