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Wed

11.15.06

Brady Forrest

Brady Forrest

Web 2.0 Conference Thoughts

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.


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Comments: 2

Michael Bernstein   [11.15.06 02:17 PM]

"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."

Umm. This is new? The real action at *any* conference is in the hallways, so how are you going to 'work on that'? Forbid loitering?

This is the same sort of logic that leads to a sponsored 'speaking opportunity' during lunch, if I may be so bold as to bring up an annoying incident from an OSCON of a few years back.

Tim O'Reilly   [11.18.06 09:41 AM]

Michael -- I think you completely missed the point of Brady's comments. It wasn't that we somehow want to drive the entrepreneurs from the hallways into the sessions! It was a comment on the fact that the program wasn't compelling enough for the entrepreneurs. "Work on that" was a suggestion that we need to get more forward-looking content into the program.

It's a balancing act. Unlike say etech, Web 2.0 is fundamentally a business conference. And most of what's thought-provoking for the business audience is old hat to the alpha geeks.

And heck, I spend most of my time in the hallways or in meetings myself (when I'm not sick like I was at this conference, more of which I spent in bed than I liked.)

As to the OScon event you mentioned, you're right, that was a mistake. We were trying to shoehorn a last-minute announcement into the conference, and all the "normal" slots were taken up. But at the time, Real Networks making a commitment to open source seemed like enough of a victory for the movement to give them the exposure.

And frankly, content overlapping with meals is a part of many conferences, often successfully. It just didn't work that time at OScon.


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