I just finished chatting with Kavin, the CEO over at LOLapps, and he’ll be joining us for my favorite talk of the day so far, a panel on how NOT to build social apps.  :D  He’ll be joined by Kevin Barenblat, CEO and Founder of Context Optional, and Vinay Mahagaokar, the Head of Director of Product at RockYou.  I’m talking with Dave McClure about moderating the panel, though we haven’t confirmed yet, and have invites out to PlayFish, Buddy Media, and Appssavvy to join in the discussion.

My partner in crime on this event, Diane, has also been talking with the guys over at GetSatisfaction.  Lane and Thor will be tag teaming with us to help kick start the day!  I’m excited to welcome them on to the agenda.

I’ve still got about a half-dozen slots open, so do let me know if there are great C-level folk in the social web world that you want to see there.  :)

Structure 09, their Cloud Computing Conference, is coming up on June 25th, and they’ve offered my readers and attendees a special 10% discount.  Woot! (You can click the link to get it.)  It’s taking place at the beautiful and recently renovated Mission Bay Conference Center.  This is definitely not an event to miss.

Here’s what they say about it, in their own words:

**Come hear the biggest players in the cloud computing industry**
For our second annual event, we bring out the industry’s biggest influencers to help clarify the present situation and investigate the evolution of the cloud computing ecosystem. The event is produced by Om Malik of GigaOM, who has covered cloud computing from the beginning. We don’t just talk about cloud computing once a year; it’s a part of our ongoing editorial coverage on GigaOM every day. Attend Structure 09 and be part of the conversation.

MEET OUR THOUGHT LEADERS
All of the key influencers in cloud computing and the web infrastructure industry will be on hand to discuss the future of the business.

Keynote Speakers
* Marc Benioff - Chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com
* Paul Sagan - President and CEO, Akamai

Speaker Lineup includes
* Werner Vogels - VP and CTO, Amazon
* Greg Papadopoulos - CTO and EVP - Research and Development, Sun Microsystems
* Russ Daniels - VP and CTO, Cloud Services Strategy, HP
* Michael Stonebraker, PhD - CTO and Co-Founder, Vertica Systems
* Steve Herrod - CTO and Sr. VP of R&D, VMware
* Dr. Willy Chiu - Vice President, IBM Cloud Labs & HiPODS, IBM
* David Yen - EVP and GM, Data Center Business Group, Juniper Networks
* David Hitz - Founder and Executive Vice President, NetApp
* Jonathan Heiliger - VP, Technical Operations, Facebook
* Vijay Gill - VP Engineering, Google
* Yousef Khalidi - Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Corporation
* Raj Patel - VP of Global Networks, Yahoo!
* and many more!  A full list and agenda is at http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/speakers/ 

——————————————-

** SCHEDULE OF TOPICS ANNOUNCED **

We have announced our programming schedule for Structure 09. Full details available here - http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/schedule/

Some topics are:

• The Myth of the One-Size-Fits-All Cloud
• Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise Clouds As A First Step
• On The Shoulders of Giants
• Building The Perfect Host for Web Apps
• From Databases to Dataspaces
• Better Broadband: Enabling the Cloud Era

“The Social Gaming Summit 2009 is a one day event focused on the intersection of games and the social web. This year’s event will focus on helping social games developers build, monetize, and grow their social games. We’re bringing together the leaders in free-to-play games, social networking, and payments infrastructure for a full day of panels and talks.”

Check out the Social Gaming Summit while you await FailCon!

It’s an honor to be working with Yahoo! and we’re extremely excited to have them with us, especially as they come increasingly close to launching their own developer platform.

SNAP Summit^3 is looking to be our best conference yet. Pivoting off the boom in social applications, we’re expanding our focus to look at user experience and engagement, a topic relevant not only to app developers, but anyone who’s building on the social web.

And for those lucky folks who read our blog, we are offering an Economy discount till Friday the 26th.  Head on over to http://snapsummit3.eventbrite.com/?discount=ICanHazRecessionPlz

We are doing it again: only bigger and better.  We will be reaching out to our past attendees to learn what you want to hear, who you want to meet, and what you want to see.  The venue is bigger, the internet is stronger, and the day is already looking to be exciting.

50 Limited Early Bird Rate tickets have just been released, so pick yours up now.

Here are some of the highlights from the survey:

• 90% of attendees rated our conference favorably, either as “Good” or “Great.”
• Our venue, the Commonwealth Club, got less flattering remarks. 51% rated it positively, with the rest viewing it in an average or negative light.
• Biggest gripe: overcrowding. Most talks and workshops were standing room only, due to a limited number of seats for an overflow audience.
• Second biggest gripe: small nametags. The size of the nametags made it harder for people to network.
• Josh Porter and BJ Fogg split the award for best speaker. Josh spoke on Social Interface Design, while BJ talked about Mass Interpersonal Persuasion, a new field he’s researching at his Stanford lab.
• Many people enjoyed the workshops, while others complained that they couldn’t be two places at once. We will continue offering workshops, since we feel they give attendees a better choice of topics and interests.

We learned a couple things from the survey. First, make sure that everyone gets a seat. Second, we’ll focus on finding more independent speakers like BJ and Josh, who people really enjoyed hearing. Third, we’ll buy bigger nametags

If you have any other feedback or suggestions, please comment!

https://sfbeta.wufoo.com/forms/snap-summit-20-event-survey/

We are reading your thoughts and taking them into consideration.  Christian and I will be making larger, double-sided badges, for one.  We will also make sure there is better internet (we did work on it for this event, but complications continued to arise.)  We will look into other venues, but they are hard to come by affordably in this town.  We also hope to get a better media arm for the company, complete with a regular blog and recordings of our events, but at least for this one we will be getting all the slides we can up online.

So thank you all for your feedback already; we look forward to seeing you all at our future events.