I've spent the day so far at the Supernova 2009 conference. It's kind of like TED for networks, though the talks are not nearly as soul-wrenching and deeply moving as those at TED.

Still, for a technology conference, the discussions are much more philanthropic and future-focused than most other shows. As one attendee from a small telco in Texas put it: "If I have to listen to one more talk about which ADSL modem we should use, I'm gonna explode." Thus, this fellow chose Supernova as a conference to come a learn about what's likely to happen in networks (social, physical and metaphysical) over the next five to 10 years.

Yesterday was the heavy stuff: discussions of changing capitalism, government and ourselves. One of the most interesting pairings of talks came from Danah Boyd, from Microsoft Research and Adam Greenfield of Nokia. Boyd discussed the disconnect between what you see on Twitter and what your friends see. Your view of how people act on Twitter is a factor of who you read, and those other folks view Twitter through your eyes and the eyes of other people they follow.

But you are not seeing what they are, and vice versa. Boyd gave some riveting examples: An urban youth who was applying to Harvard wrote about how he wanted to escape from the gang life of his hometown, while his MySpace page was packed with gang references and symbols. Boyd said her advice to Harvard was that to survive in his day-to-day life, this is how the youth had created his MySpace page. She advised that Harvard ignore MySpace and concentrate on the applicant's essay; that MySpace page was not made for them to see, she said.

Greenfield, on the other hand, discussed the fact that Twitter is being used to allow devices to talk. He referenced a draw-bridge in London that updates through Twitter: "I am opening." "I am closing." He then referenced a Gartner report which stated that over the next five years, a quarter of all Internet traffic would be coming from sensors. That, he said, means that we'll have APIs for access to the real world.

But perhaps the most interesting thing I heard during yesterday's talks was when Andrew McLaughlin, from the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that the government should be a platform. He said that the government's primary purpose, when it comes to technology, should be to present huge amounts of machine-readable information to the public for use. This is reflected by the already existant sites monitoring the stimulus spending and Data.gov.

More on McLaughlin later. Stay tuned.