On Friday, the Radar team got together to discuss the Web 2.0 Summit. Here were some of our thoughts:
- We saw lots of features rather than products: There were fewer full company launches and more features being added. Is this a sign of the market being more mature or that more companies are hoping for an acquisition rather than an IPO?
- Commercial penetration is chasing users away: It was noted that MySpace’s traffic was down from the previous month. We’re wondering if this is a sign of users running away from monetization. Will there be a continuous migration of users away from properties as they try to capitalize on their success?
- We see increasing intersection of the physical world with internet sevices. This came up in 3 places. Fedex, Salesforce, and Amazon. Jeff Bezos pointed out that not only Amazon’s servers but also their logistics infrastructure is for rent, with Fulfillment by Amazon. (Tim promptly christened this service S4 – Simple Storage Service for Stuff).
- User’s data: This was also a recurring theme starting with Wesabe‘s Marc Hedlund’s Open Data Workshop. We heard about it again from Google’s Eric Schmidt when he said that he supported user’s being able to take their data with them. SixApart put forward the Open Media Profile (think GData, + OpenSearch + Media RSS) to allow users transport their data between services. These will continue.
- The entrepenaurs were in the hallways: We noticed and we heard that a lot of action was in the hallways (and a conference room). We’re going to work on that for next year. We’d like to have more of them in the room with the rest of the conference.
- Teen panels get people out of their world: The teen panel was regarded by many as the most refreshing piece of the conference. We get trapped in our blog-nonMySpace world. It’s good to get that wake-up call every so often. The panel loved Google, MySpace, YouTube and didn’t seem to care which browser they used. No other properties made a noticeable dent across all of the panelists.
There was a similar wake-up call at Widgets Live earlier in the week. Photobucket asked how many users were in the room compared to Flickr; the crowd was overwhelmingly Flickred unlike the rest of the internet. It’s good to remember that the success of these companies is not entirely dependent on their geek chic cred.
Great, summarized quotes:
- “Users want speed” – Marissa Mayer
- “Don’t listen to investment bankers” – Bob Parsons</ul
Interesting developments:
- intel’s Suite Two – bringing blogs, wikis and RSS to the enterprise
- 6A’s Open Media Profile– being able to share my data between services is something that I have wanted for ages.
- Digg’s visualizations – will any of these come close to replacing the homepage?
- The Stikkit (clever stickie notes from our own Rael Dornfest), Klostu (social network and ID system for message boards), and Adify (an ad platform for ad networks) launches were the most notable in our book.
- Live Labs’ Photosynth – just a viewer right now, but it holds amazing potenial for organizing and viewing photos
Interesting coverage