Can the infamous website 4chan, known as the home of the mercurial prank community Anonymous, hold the seeds of something more mainstream? In a keynote Sunday afternoon at South by Southwest Interactive, a Web conference in Austin, Texas, its notorious founder "moot," going by his real name, Christopher Poole, outlined the insights from 4chan that he's trying to apply in his new startup, Canvas, which has raised $625,000 in venture capital.

Like 4chan, Canvas is primarily an image board, where users upload and edit images, often building off each other to produce a humorous narrative. Unlike 4chan, Canvas requires users to log in, a fact sure to discourage at least some of 4chan's more unsavory elements. Though users do have to log in on Canvas, they can still post anonymously. Also unlike 4chan, Canvas saves posts so that a lasting record is produced.

For both sites, Poole values the idea of "fluid identity." When everything on the Internet requires you to attach your true identity, he said, "you can't make mistakes the same way you used to." Poole particularly criticized the popular social network Facebook, which requires users to maintain their real, single identities for all their posts.

While anonymity has been equated with lack of authenticity and cowardice, Poole said, "I think that's totally wrong. Anonymity is authenticity." Only in the safety of anonymity, he argued, can people play in the most honest way.

Poole is trying to change how identity works from 4chan to Canvas, but he also resists going as far as Facebook.

Poole also praised the "creative mutation" that has grown on both sites. He described the evolution of an image as a sort of "riffing." Users are participating in a sort of musical jam, though in this case the tools are Photoshop and MS Paint, and the medium is Justin Bieber's face.

Poole's put a lot of thought into getting those tools into users' hands as much as possible. Canvas is designed to make it easy for people to edit images even if they have no experience. It includes picture tags that people can slap onto images if they don't want to put more time into the process. Soon, he hopes, that kind of playing with media can extend to other forms, such as audio and video.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Poole values the shared experience of participating in a group activity, even if that activity is ephemeral or has no purpose beyond having fun. He spoke reverently of being on 4chan at 9 p.m. on a Sunday--its peak usage time--and knowing that he's part of a unique moment. He hopes that part of what will hold people to Canvas is the desire to come back and see how an image has progressed.

Poole is a powerful and important voice, particularly in his role as foil to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. It's refreshing to hear a defense of fun, and to hear about a social site that is actually, essentially social.

On the other hand, other than slightly more rigid identity, and slightly more persistent posts, it's hard to see how Canvas is ultimately much different from 4chan--particularly considering that Poole is likely to attract people who are already fans of 4chan to his new site. Poole previously founded the site that has come to represent the Internet's id. His vision for Canvas sounds like a subdued version of the same, and it's not clear what he's aiming for.

In the opening keynote at South By Southwest Interactive today, location-based game company SCVNGR's energetic "chief ninja" Seth Priebatsch outlined his broader vision of what games can do for the world.

Priebatsch has long talked about putting a "game layer" over the real world, but this has so far been mostly literal. People who have loaded SCVNGR's apps on their smart phones can engage in challenges at locations they visit, many of which are brief games.

But Priebatsch sees something bigger on the way. The last 10 years have been building technology that adds a social layer to the world, he said. This was all about building a framework to express the connections that people form in the course of a day. Games, Priebatsch declared, will drive "the next decade of human technological interaction."

Though the game layer is brand new and has not yet been built, he believes it will provide a technological framework for "influence," since games influence people to take actions through both social interaction and game mechanics. The power that games have to shape people's actions, he said, is "fascinating, very cool, and just a little bit frightening."

Priebatsch outlined five problems that he expects game dynamics could address. They ranged from making location-based services more mainstream--admittedly a niche, self-interested concern--to making people feel more able to address global problems such as climate change.

Perhaps the 22-year-old Princeton dropout's smartest discussion was of how a game layer could improve school. "School is one of the most perfect game ecosystems out there," he said, noting that it includes many motivated players, a system of allies and enemies, has a captive audience, and a well-developed system of reward and punishment. The problem, he said, is that the game of school "is poorly designed."

In particular, he criticized grading systems. While they give students different levels to aspire to and a sense of status--both important for game dynamics--they're also set up so that people can lose. "School is a game where you don't want anyone to lose," Priebatsch said.

He argued that grading systems could borrow from schemes that have been shown to engage players more effectively, such as the progression used in games such as World of Warcraft. In those games, players gain experience over time and can progress to playing very powerful characters. However, they don't get penalized or "leveled down" (as happens when someone gets a failing grade). Adjusting grades to measure progress in a positive way, Priebatsch argued, could focus students on gaining the next level, however long it takes.

Speaking about topics more immediate to his business, Priebatsch also analyzed the game dynamics that aren't working well for location-based services.

One of the key problems he sees is that the game is too hard right now for most people--it requires special equipment (smart phones), and you can only play if you're in the right place at the right time. Priebatsch suggested that location-based services could come up with looser requirements, such as allowing people to participate by saying that they plan to go to a location, or giving them ways to engage with a location from afar.

Priebatsch also argued that location-based services have their reward schedules out of whack. "We're training early adopters to hit a button and get a reward, which is a level of reward that we can't actually deliver," he said. For example, he pointed to a Facebook Places campaign that gave a free pair of jeans to each of the first 10,000 people to check in at a Gap store. Such promotions gain attention, he said, but people lose interest when they're no longer getting rewarded.

Priebatsch has previously told me that he reads hundreds of pages a month of research into games and their mechanics and effects on people. His intensity and rapid-fire conversation style can make for an overwhelming outpouring of ideas. But he's one of the most interesting people thinking about game mechanics today. His business grounds him in practicalities more than some of the (still fascinating) academic thinkers out there, but his optimism and energy save him from giving the impression of calculating profiteering that can come out of companies like the frighteningly profitable Zynga.

Expect to hear much more from Priebatsch as the game layer develops.

Here at South By Southwest Interactive, the keynote interview of Daniel Ek, the 26-year-old founder of European music service Spotify, provided some satisfying insight into the major new music site.

Spotify has built a lovely music application that uses a peer-to-peer architecture to stream music at lightning speeds (a real improvement over the sometimes spotty service that comes with many other music streaming applications). The site is only licensed in Europe, but Ek says the site has 7 million users in 6 countries, and he's been working hard to get it licensed in the United States. Users can listen to music for free, with ads, or can pay for a subscription that grants access to perks such as the Spotify mobile app, and song downloads.

I couldn't help noticing, however, Ek's artful dodge to the question of how artists are paid by his service. The subject was broached by an audience member, who identified himself as an independent musician and thanked Ek profusely for the great application. He wanted to know how much he would be paid.

"It's complicated," was, in essence, Ek's reply. But he did reveal that it's a revenue sharing model; artists get paid a proportion of whatever Spotify gets paid, presumably based on the number of plays on the site they receive.

Ek's reply was disappointing because this is the million dollar question for many music sites. Pandora's been on the verge of going under for years in part because they've paid artists even when they couldn't afford to. It's clever of Spotify to find a way to be cash-positive where other sites have failed, but it means the artists must wait to be paid a fair rate.

There see other problems too. For example, pop stars are likely to draw the highest proportion of plays, but how does that relate to which fans pay a subscription fee? It seems that part of what Spotify will need to figure out is what brings money to the site and how to reimburse artists fairly.