Post Web 2.0 Expo, time to get back to work and thank our sponsors. Also of course thanks to our readers and writers!
Read/WriteWeb's sponsors are:
Wild Apricot is bringing web 2.0 to non-profits. It offers membership database, event and website management for non-profits, clubs and associations.
Zoho is a leading Web Office suite. I met up with them at the Web 2.0 Expo and discovered they have a lot of great new productivity apps coming soon.
Userplane is the premier provider of communication software for online communities. I met them too at Expo - expect more integration with AOL properties soon.
Compete is more than just a statistics service to rival Alexa; Compete also provides search, analytics, shopping deals, and a personalized homepage.
BlogRovr is a download plugin for Firefox 2.0, which 'fetches' related blog stories for you as you surf the Web. BlogRovr is complementary to RSS Readers.
DesktopOnDemand is a free online desktop that lets you access your desktop remotely. DOD comes with 1GB of free disk space, with extra space available for a fee.
Eurekster is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.
Also check out Read/WriteWeb's Job Board (in partnership with VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock and run by JobThread).
If you would like to enquire about sponsoring Read/WriteWeb, please email the editor for a Media Kit.
Just as it's become the
custom for Tim O'Reilly to open the Web 2.0 conference keynotes with a fireside chat with
Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and then later for John Battelle to interview a Google exec (it
used to be Sergey Brin, but now Eric Schmidt has taken over that task), it's becoming
Read/WriteWeb's custom to do a conference wrap-up post. Personally I do it mainly to get
my own thoughts in order, because these conferences are very hectic and so it's hard to
think at a macro level while you're in the 'eye of the storm'. In addition, some of the
Read/WriteWeb authors have done their own mini-wrapups.
So what was different about this web 2.0 conference? It was the 3rd Web 2.0 Conference run by CMP/O'Reilly Media that I've been to (I followed the 2004 Web 2.0 conference virtually). Check out my previous wrapups of the Web 2.0 Summit and the Web 2.0 Conference in 2005. The Web 2.0 Expo was the biggest of all 3, both in terms of the venue and the number of people attending - estimates ranged from 10-16k. It also had more of a developer focus, although there were plenty of business people too. More on that in a minute.
To all hypochondriacs who
yearn to make their imagined ailments seem more legit, pay attention. There exists a
website that tells you what's currently making people in your area sick. The website is
Who is Sick? and it has other uses besides adding
legitimacy to fictitious symptoms.
Who is Sick? is a Google Maps mashup, which as Alex Iskold wrote in March is the most popular type of mashup. Who is Sick? attempts to track "sicknesses" as they spread across an area.
Users can enter their symptoms, which are mapped into six categories (including an "Other" catch-all), their age, sex, days since experiencing the symptoms, further details, and their zip code. The information is then fed into a searchable Google map. The service is 100% anonymous.
On Monday morning I attended a panel which included two case
studies from leading businesses built around open source software applications - Sugar CRM and MySQL AB. The case studies were presented by their
respective CEOs, John Roberts and Marten Mickos, and focused on the business model their
organizations have adopted.
The rest of the day, I found myself reflecting a lot on the presentation and then - as luck would have it - I ran into MySQL AB's Marten Mickos and Zack Urlocker (Executive VP of Products) at a happy hour that evening. I ended up talking to them about their business over a few beers and concluded that they are a great lesson for any website looking to scale audience.
Yesterday afternoon the Web 2.0 Expo included two
sessions on widgets. The first was a presentation by Dion Hinchcliffe, which provided an
Overview of Badges and
Widgets. Immediately following that session, two widget syndication companies
provided back to back presentations in a session called Using Widget Syndication
for Online Marketing and Measurement. While officially these sessions were part of
two separate conference tracks, by a show of hands approximately half of the attendees in
the sessions attended both of them. Graeme Thickins wrote a very good overview of the
second session for Read/WriteWeb. What follows are some of the key points from Dion's
presentation.
Dion opened by unpacking the fact that the web is becoming much more of what he characterizes as a DIY Phenomenon. This cultural change is what he credits as the driver for the popularity of widgets. Specifically the DIY ethos on the web has four components:
by Graeme Thickins
If you're in the online marketing game and are not yet hip to widgets, listen up. Two emerging Web 2.0 technology firms focused in this space have a message for you. Those companies are Widgetbox and ClearSpring, both of which presented in a session on Tuesday afternoon at Web 2.0 Expo that was billed as "Using Widget Syndication for Online Marketing and Measurement".
What is a widget? According to Ed Anuff, CEO and
cofounder of Widgetbox, it's a "small piece of dynamic content" on your web site, blog,
or social network page. Sometimes they're also called badges. An example of a widget is
the Flash-based Flickr badge shown to the right, which is one I use in the sidebar of my
blog.
Why would you want to have a widget strategy, asked Anuff? Because they're contextual and personalized, they're social, they're visual and interactive, and they're viral. "They let you take an experience and share it with others," he said. They allow for self-expression, they provide site enhancement, and they facilitate ads and commerce - for example, a shopping cart can be implemented in a widget.
There were two sessions today on User-Centric identity at Web 2.0 Expo. I attended the first one etitled “Implementing OpenID”, which was conducted by David Recordon of Verisign and Brian Ellin of JanRain. The session was well attended and it was surprising to see that more than 50% (according to a raised hand vote by David) of the users had heard of OpenID. This is testiment to the momentum OpenID has created in the industry. The session started with a brief summary of the benefits of OpenID :
Yesterday in the Web 2.0 Expo booths, I checked out Bungee Labs - an ambitious new on-demand, web-based development environment that enables developers to build and deploy web apps that utilize the large variety of APIs and web services out on the Internet. The platform is very broad, but if I had to boil it down to a core concept then the term "utility computing" is probably the one. Because ultimately Bungee Labs enables you to build and deploy a web app, but only pay for it when you yourself make money from the web app. In other words, as a developer and/or entrepreneur, you only ever pay Bungee Labs upon commercial deployment of the web app you've built.
To find out more about the system, I spoke yesterday to CEO Martin Plaehn and VP Community Alex Barnett. Bungeeconnect is the name of the actual development platform and its most striking feature, at least to me, was that it easily allows developers to utilize hundreds of APIs - from the likes of Google, Amazon, eBay and others. The web apps that result are cross-platform (running on Windows, Mac, Linux; as well as all the main browsers), so all up it is a very inclusive system in terms of web services and the underplying PC/browser platforms. The following diagram shows the high level concept:
Today at Web 2.0 Expo Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly announced that Google will add a presentations product to its Web Office range of apps, thus completing a Web Office suite and ending (many) months of speculation. It was soon confirmed by the official Google blog, where the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team informed us about "the bun we've got in the oven" - meaning a presentations app. Helping the, er, procreation of the presentations app (what's with the baby pun?) was the acquisition today of Tonic - a technology for presentation creation and document conversion. There's also some debate on Techcrunch as to how far along Google was with the presentations app already (hmmm, ok baby puns are fun).
Yet, seriously now, in today's speech Eric Schmidt continued the line about Google Web Office NOT being a direct competitor of Microsoft Office. Who's he kidding? Curiously, this line of thought was continued in one of the Expo sessions I attended later in the day - where Rajen Sheth, Enterprise Product Manager, Google, also claimed they aren't competing with Microsoft. Rajen's argument was well thought out, and went as follows: competing with MS would miss the main goal for a Web-based office suite. Instead Google is starting from the ground up and building a suite of products that will leverage "the native use of the Internet". Collaboration is a killer app, and it is a different paradigm from what Microsoft Office does.
I paraphrased Rajen, but he did make a convincing case. Especially as web apps being 'web native' is a key concept we espouse here on Read/WriteWeb. So what do you think? Are Eric Schmidt and Rajen Sheth right that Google Web Office doesn't compete with Microsoft Office? Or should they fess up and admit that they have Redmond in their sights? Please tell us in the poll below:
Tim Westergren, founder of Internet radio station Pandora, has sent out a letter to an unknown number of people asking for help about licensing fees. Specifically this relates to "a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora."
We don't know the full details of the issue, but as an innovative web service that we appreciate and have covered a few times before, we thought we'd share Tim Westergren's concerns with you. If you agree with Tim, by all means sign his petition. See also Gizmodo's article on this issue. Here is the letter in its entirety:
