On February 10, 2010, Poole spoke at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach, California. He spoke about the increasing prevalence of persistent user identities and the sharing of personal information on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and he also spoke about the value of anonymous posting on sites such as 4chan. Fred Leal of the Brazilian newspaper "O Estado de S. Paulo" said his inclusion in the conference "indicates that something extraordinary is happening... [4chan] challenges every Internet convention: it is, alone, the antithesis of Google, social networking sites, and blogs."