I'm compelled to share three observations from the Social Loco conference I attended yesterday.

#1 - Social Loco Was a Boondoggle. I learned zip, zero, nada, nothing. This second event (I also attended the inaugural event last year) reminded me of Marcus Evans LBS World Forums that ran in the early 2000s - a room packed with pundits sharing speculation with little substance. That was the state of "LBS" years ago, and I saw so many similarities at Social Loco my eyes hurt. The "walk-by-a-Starbucks" believers were out in force sharing insights so inspiring that at one point I saw a known member of the Georati leave the room in a hurry looking for a barf bag.

#2 - Twitter is Boring. Most Starbucks-believers at Social Loco were working the back channel and Tweetdeck for iPad was in full effect. As I looked around the room I reached some sort of strange epiphany that Twitter is boring and not fun. Twitter was fun when it was a back channel, but today it's a mainstream channel. I personally like feeling specially connected to a small group to comment on events. The larger crowd formalizes the exchange and as a result it's boring! A few of us had a Disco session going on, which was much more fun than the main #SocialLoco stream.

#3 - Google is Disingenuous. Mayer's deliberately naive explanation of Google's mobile location data harvesting practices was entirely disingenuous. Something to effect of "we use user locations to give better driving directions" is total BS. I use Latitude and know what Google is collecting about my Google account name. Have you ever seen this interview? Comments during Battelle's Social Loco fireside chat sounded similar.