Dan R, Jonathan Miller at PC Forum

Dan Rosensweig (COO Yahoo, at far left) and Jonathan Miller (head of AOL, near left) have joined Eric onstage. A pretty lengthy discussion of the role of social networking in their businesses, including Orkut. Eric acknowledge that Orkut was strategic to Google’s ability to know more about its users so as to provide better service to them, and when it comes out of beta, it’ll be integrated in some way into Google. Miller says he sees social networking as not having its own business model, but rather as BASF – making other businesses better. Dan (and later Eric agreed) said that social networking is a way to make sense of a world that has 10-20 billion pages that are all indexed and available – providing a context for better and more intelligently filtered information. The entire conversation is pitched in the context – provided by Esther, who is very engaged this year so far – that these companies are playing in a market that is several orders of magnitude larger than the IT business – what Eric called the information/media business. Architecting the information space is their main product, they agreed, and that is a huge business which is in the early innings.