• Clay Shirky’s talk on the role of inconvenience in designing social systems – with a great example of how technology has made some things overt (like a change in relationship status) that were once not easily found by your larger group of friends and how that changes the social interactions we have.
• Hans Rosling of Gapminder.org showing some great data visualizations.
• A fun demo from Charles Huang from Guitar Hero – oh how I want one of those!

More videos can be viewed from the Zeitgeist Conference on the Google Zeitgeist Channel.

And hey, with the WGA strike still carrying on with no end in site, and shows shutting down left and right, perhaps this will be a palatable alternative for those seeking high-quality bite-sized entertainment.

Wow, you’d think that Google would be protective of advertising from competitors (Ask.com) on their own Google branded channel on YouTube.

Why not instead, create customizable content that people are willing to embed in their own blogs, iGoogle and the like? That way you can have an ongoing, dynamic feed of information that reaches your dedicated audience.

Here is a nice one from Daft Punk that includes video clips, tour info and other fun sections for their fans:

While InviteShare is relatively buggy, and has some serious usability flaws, the free invite exchange already has nearly 20,000 users, and has issued more than 21,000 beta invites from 44 sites since it went live two weeks ago. While it is a fantastic egalitarian approach to granting eager users access to new betas, InviteShare also sheds some light on the desirability and popularity of sites currently in private beta (or invite-only mode) simply by showing the supply versus demand of invites, which may very well be one of the reasons why TechCrunch purchased the site in the first place.

Below is a list of all private betas listed on InviteShare as of this morning. This table also notes how many users are waiting for invites as well as how many invites have been sent for each site:

This chart points to a couple of notable observations:

InviteShare stats could be used as a rough metric to determine where a site is in its beta cycle. Some sites abound in excess invitations. Joost, for example, currently gives members unlimited invites, so InviteShare has no waiting list for people wanting to join Joost. And with over 1 million beta subscribers on Joost, it appears that it is ready to go live soon. It would be useful to correlate the number of invites a private beta offers to its users with the number of people waiting in queue for invites on InviteShare, as one way to gauge where a site is in its beta release cycle.

InviteShare also can be used as a barometer of how popular a site is. Some sites in beta may have maxed out on the desirability to join. Pownce, for example, has been issuing invites 6 at a time, so any given user only has 6-18 invites depending on when they first joined. Like Joost, Pownce has no waiting list on InviteShare for those seeking invites, but unlike Joost, Pownce has only been around since June, and doesn’t give its members unlimited invites. Does that bode poorly for the future Pownce? It is hard to say, but it is true that some sites launch private betas partly as a marketing tactic–to invoke buzz and exclusivity. Again, being able to correlate the number of invites against the initial beta release date and InviteShare stats could be telling. Other sites with no waiting list include Babelgum, Dopplr, Grandcentral, and Moola.

Some sites are in private beta because they are not stable enough to support an open influx of subscribers. Slowly, these sites expand their network to include more and more users as they become more stable, but all along the way they are carefully restricting the number of invites any given user has. The sites that appear to be earlier in their beta cycle on InviteShare have smaller amounts of invites sent, and a healthy waiting list of people who want to join. These include I’minlikewithyou, BrightKite and IwantSandy.

Some sites want to remain small, and they (and their user base) are actually not interested in rapid growth. A Small World, a social network targeted to the jet-set elite and society types, has been around for 6 years, and still maintains a heightened sense of exclusivity. While it is listed on InviteShare, no users of A Small World have yet shared their invites, even though there is a queue of nearly 500 people waiting for invites. File sharing sites like Oink and Supertorrents also have lengthy waiting lists. With both Oink and A Small World, this makes sense, as the person who is doing the inviting is supposed to be responsible for the behavior of their invited contact within the network. In these cases, a site like InviteShare may not work as well, as many people may not feel trusting enough to invite strangers to their network if they are ultimately going to be responsible for that stranger’s behavior.

Just as telling as what sites are included on InviteShare, are the sites that aren’t on the list. Sites like Freebase and MyLiveSearch haven’t made the cut yet, nor does there seem to be any easy way to add new sites to the existing list, leading me to believe that the list of featured sites is hand-picked. Which is probably just fine, since it prevents cunning Web 2.0 companies from overwhelming or gaming the system with an undesirable sea of useless “invite-only” sites. It will be interesting to follow what sites do get included to future updates of InviteShare, as the ones to make the list will already have a caché of being desirable simply by being listed on the exclusive exchange in the first place. I could see lots of folks using InviteShare as a great way to gauge early success of private beta sites. And this marketplace is completely under the thumbs of TechCrunch.

One interesting point Seth makes is in regards to pyramid schemes, specifically when it may not have to do with the exchange of money, or if money is exchanged, it is almost a side benefit. He notes that sites like Digg have an element of a pyramid scheme built into the very core of the site’s design. Meaning that some Digg uses can abuse the system in a way to promote themselves, their clients, or issues. And while word of mouth can be used in a manipulative way, could there be an invisible hand that self-regulates these social tools due to our desire to embrace authenticity, while eschewing motives that seem like scams?