Web 2.0: Final Thoughts

I’m back in Portland (that’s Portland, Maine – a fact which elicited
looks of confusion, dismay, and/or sympathy from many Web 2.0
attendees), recuperating from my week in San Francisco.   The pace of
Web 2.0 was so frenetic that, although I did a lot of blogging, I
didn’t have a much of a chance to mentally process everything that went
on until today.  So here are my post-processing thoughts.

The highlight of the conference was the people.  I suppose that’s true
of any conference, but it took me until the the second day to realize
that some of the most interesting things were happening outside the
sessions.   During the breaks, when there wasn’t anything happening on
stage, the volume of people and noise in the hallways made conversation
somewhat of a challenge (and made me afraid that I was losing my voice
from shouting).  So some of the best conversations I had ended up
coming while sessions where in progress.  I had the pleasure of meeting
a bunch of people whose work I’ve admired for some time, and a few
others who I really should have been familiar with, but (somewhat
embarrassingly) wasn’t.  I started to list everyone here, but it seemed
too much like name dropping, so I’ll just mention a few people by
name.  First, Jason Fried, who was
nice to me and gave me helpful advice.  Thanks, Jason.  Also href="http://kottke.org/">Jason Kottke (who in real life is still
dryly funny), Rohit Khare
(who seems to be up to speed, and ahead of the curve, on just about
everything tech-related), href="http://ifindkarma.typepad.com/relax/">Adam Rifkin, (who made
my day by doing the “I’m not worthy” bow),  href="http://ross.typepad.com/"> Ross Mayfield, href="http://aa.typepad.com/mobile/">Andrew Anker (who explained
the New York-San Francisco connection, or “why west coasters don’t like
New England”), Joe Kraus, and
Mark Wong-Van Haren.  It was great to meet all of you.

It was interesting to see a real tech conference in action.  Everybody
had laptops, WiFi was provided, and so there was a constant flow of
blogging, emails, and IM going on in parallel with the face-to-face
sessions and conversations at the conference.  The 15″ Powerbook was
clearly the laptop of choice, with 12″ Powerbooks and iBooks fairly
popular as well.  It was pretty amazing to see all the familiar names
and faces in my iChat Rendezvous window.

There are a few themes that stuck with me.  These are the things that
people were talking about the most:

• RSS.  Publishers want to know how to make money off it, which
  means not just advertising but being able to track readership.  Lots of
  people and companies, including the new Rojo.com,
  are thinking about the problem of being able to wade through hundreds
  or thousands of feeds and find the most important stories.  I’m not yet
  sure how I feel about this.  My instincts say that humans are
  incredibly good at filtering out unimportant information, and that many
  users will only want to subscribe to a few feeds.  So for a lot of
  people it might be perfectly reasonable to just skim through every new
  message, and ignore the ones they aren’t interested in.  I could be
  wrong on this, and time will tell.  In any case, I came away with the
  feeling that nobody is really sure how the average net user is going to
  use RSS.  Lots of startups are making bets, though.
• Wikis.  Web 2.0 had a wiki, Ross Mayfield from SocialText did a
  workshop on using Wikis in the enterprise, Joe Kraus introduced his new
  company, which is selling a WIki.  It’s interesting to see the life
  cycle of a technology like Wikis.  They’ve been around for href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory">almost ten years with a
  limited but enthusiastic following, gained credibility with big
  projects like wikipedia, became a standard tool for software projects,
  and now all of a sudden there are two start-ups selling commercial
  software, and betting that wikis are going to take off in the
  enterprise.
• Web APIs.  The theme of the conference was “the Web as Platform”,
  and a lot of the sessions touched on APIs.  All the big sites – Amazon,
  Google, Ebay, PayPal, etc. – are opening up some functionality through
  web services.  These companies seem to have put some thought into
  providing web services that enable developers to use their platform
  without giving away their sources of revenue (although it will be
  interestingn to see their reaction when people start to use the APIs in
  unpleasantly unexpected ways).  Amazon’s services in particular look
  cool – I’ll have to find come time to play with them.

All said and done, it was a great experience.  I’ll be looking forward
to next year’s edition.

Posted on Monday, October 11th, 2004 at 8:12 pm.