What an awesome trip it has been hanging out in Palo Alto for the past few days in geek mecca. A magical place where geeks are rockstars and tech is humming.

I met Max Levchin, the guy who started Paypal and Slide and James Hong, who started “Hot or Not” and a ton of other powerful minds and VC’s - truly inspirational.

On the trip also did some cool visits:

Facebook

Even got a pic of the Facebook fridge : ) Free food all the time. And we thought Developers needed beer to produce fast.

Guitar Hero

The ultimate highlight was to watch Charles Huang  the founder and creator of Guitar Hero at RedOctane Games demoing the latest version of the game which has not been released yet. It was phenominal. And to hear the fairytale story was even cooler. What a down to earth guy. He took huge risks, could not get funding and then hit the jackpot. Version 3 did a Billion dollars sales. Nice. Read here

EA Games

EA games was spectacular but their sexy high-end campus was a major contrast to the more Homely environment at RedOctane which I preferred. But there were shit-hot demos of some new games on the best screen you have ever seen. That’s me on the EA sports basketball court which they actually use to report to shareholders. Different.

Stanford University

The geek, web entrepreneur sausage machine. They just keep coming. The campus is very impressive.
In another life I would have loved to study there. It occurred to me that on some campuses the Sporty guys get the girls. Here I think it’s the techno-wizards. Who would have thought that all the technical innovation comes down to sex!

So - it was an awesome excursion and also fantastic to meet the guys from all our businesses around the world. I bonded most with the Polish guys - who seem to like to smoke : )

And of course I got an iphone 3g - which is sick!

Off to bed. I have to catch a flight back to SA in 4 hours.

In what it calls the latest “evolution” of its ad model, Facebook is testing a new set of ads aimed at boosting click-throughs and further tapping into the social graph on behalf of marketers.

There are mixed feelings globally about the ultimate success of advertising in social networking environments.

It is telling that In May 2008 eMarketer revised its worldwide social network ad spending estimates, now projecting that advertisers will spend £1 billion on social networks worldwide in 2008, rising to only £2.2 billion in 2011. The previous figure for 2011 was £2.4 billion.

User-generated content advertising projections are also lower than expected.

Despite the massive size and projected growth of the user-generated content

(UGC) movement, advertising revenues alongside this content will remain relatively modest. eMarketer projects US user-generated content ad revenues of $824 million in 2012, up from $162 million in 2007.
By 2012, this total will represent 1.62% of US online advertising spending, up from 0.77% in 2007.

Myspace also missed their last quartely revenue target according to Rupert Murdoch.

But I am up-beat and VERY POSITIVE about the future potential of Social Network advertising vehicles. We have just not found the winning formula yet.

I think that also to a large extent the current metrics to not capture the value of the connections that people have to brands - so it’s largely case of advertisers and site owners not being able to quantify the value.

So this is Facebook’s latest gambit. Looks like it may create a little too much noise if the filtering of the algorithm is not waxed enough but it is important to try,try,try until the solution is cracked.