The Web 2.0 Expo keynote started off with a great video from Michael Wesch .Brady and Jennifer Pahlka kicked of the official program and welcomed us all to the event. Then Tim O’Reilly took the stage and talked a lot about Web 2.0 and where things are going. He talked about the state of Web 2.0, the beginnings of the Web 2.0 Expo, and touched a bit on the issue of whether or not we’re in a bubble. His opinion is that no, we aren’t, that Web 2.0 is a fundamental shift in how people interact with technology.
The first big presentation of the day belonged to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He focused on Amazon’s new “web platform” initiatives, including Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). He gave some pretty astounding numbers on S3 including a peak day that had 921 million requests. At the peak second for the service, there were 16,600 requests. The growth numbers were also interesting. A year ago they had 800,000 “objects” on the service. Now they have over 5 BILLION.
After the presentation, Jeff sat down with Tim for a more informal chat. They talked about where the web was going and how Amazon has led the charge of commoditizing computing power which is enabling startups to think about their infrastructure. Tim also questioned the motives behind the Alexaholic dust-up and encouraged Jeff to be more open with Alexa.
Next up was John Battelle who ran a panel, “Built to Last or Built to Sell: Is There a Difference” with Mena Trott, Joe Kraus, and Jay Adelson. It was an introspective look at the minds of entrepreneurs and how they build companies. They tackled a variety of topics including thinking about structure, what it takes to “go big” and what things like venture financing can do (both good and bad) for your company. We also got some insight into the digg acquisition rumors. Jay said that it involved a lot of companies throwing out huge numbers just to get some attention.
Next up was Kevin Lynch, the chief software architect from Adobe, who demoed Apollo. He started with “San Dimas” which is eBay’s Apollo-based desktop client. He then showed off a slough of other applications including a music player (Finetune), a word processor (Buzzword) and a time tracker application (gTimer). He also announced that Salesforce.com is releasing a Flex toolkit for their Apex.
We wrapped up the keynote with three company demos. Jay Bhatti game a demo of Spock, the people finder. David Knight showed WebEx’s new application platform, WebEx Connect, and Kerry Fleming from Humanix talked about Inpowr.
Ryan Stewart is a Rich Internet Application developer and analyst. He blogs for ZDNet on the Universal Desktop as well as a personal blog, Digital Backcountry.