The new logos are just a preview of AOL's revamped look and are meant to replace AOL's swoosh triangle for good. The AOL "running man," however, will stick around the brand in some form, although the company isn't saying exactly where he will show up.

But the updated logos are a little off-putting to some. Noted technology blogger Om Malik of GigaOM posted his gut reaction Sunday night, calling them out as "lame," "ambiguous at best," and "as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie WALL-E." Ouch!

But it's easy to see where he's coming from. After all, some of the logos look more like the sorts of doodles you would find gracing high-schoolers' notebooks - like the hand doing the "sign of the horns" hand gesture. Really. "Rock on!," shouts the logo, but it reminds us more of a middle-aged heavy metal fan reminiscing about their youth than the young, hip company AOL desperately hopes to become.

Then there is the pink glob. The best way to describe this logo is a fluffy wad of bubble gum. A green scribble looks like someone had trouble getting their ballpoint ink pen going and a generic blue swirl seems to signify nothing but a lack of imagination. What content sites are these logos even associated with? Your guess is as good as ours.

CNET calls the goldfish logo "cute" (sarcastically?), but AOL isn't trying to build the next LOLcats empire, so maybe they should have forgone "cute" for something a little more meaningful and modern.

But that's just our opinion. What's yours? Let us know in the poll below.

In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted. In a follow-up post, we look at current statistics for online retail.

Recommendations Technology Advances

Over the past decade the online retail industry has seen great strides in the use of recommendations technology. Amazon has consistently led the field in this, with its sophisticated blend of personalized, social and item recommendations.

Many of the retail recommendations in use today rely on implicit user data. These systems typically track user data, which is then analyzed with a set of usually proprietary algorithms. The end result: recommendations for users. Earlier this year we looked into Baynote's recommendation system:

"Baynote observes real-time user behavior on a site and looks for implicit, emergent patterns. It uses collective intelligence and an affinity engine to analyze the data. Common behaviors which it tracks include page refers, queries, mouse movement, time spent on a page, peer behavior."

Other similar recommendation technologies we've profiled include MyBuys, ATG and richrelevance.

Social Media Takes Retail to Blogs, Social Networks

As with nearly every other industry, shopping sites have increasingly used social media to promote their wares.

According to Shop.org's recent eHoliday Study, 47.1% of retailers surveyed will be increasing their use of social media this holiday season. Specifically, more than half of retailers have "added or improved their Facebook page (60.3%) and Twitter pages (58.7%)" this year. Nearly two-thirds (65.6%) have "added or enhanced blogs and RSS feeds" over the same time period.

One result of this has been a big increase in implicit social recommendations data across social networks and blogs.

Another trend with ecommerce sites is distributed sales. Anyone can embed an Amazon store into their blog or social network these days. As Kurt Collins of social commerce vendor Cartfly told us in December, this won't replace "end destination e-commerce" - but it will "augment sales tremendously" at the edge of the network.

Mobile Commerce Arrives, Albeit Slowly...

The growth of mobile phones has been a big trend this decade. However, as Sarah Perez wrote in September, mobile commerce in the U.S. market has struggled for momentum.

According to data from eMarketer, more than 70 million U.S. mobile phone users will access the internet from their devices this year. Despite this, the m-commerce market remains immature. In an April 2009 survey by RIS News, privacy and security concerns are still at the forefront of both shoppers' and retailers' minds.

There is some promise that mobile commerce will finally gain traction in the coming decade. Mobile payments firm Billing Revolution found that on-the-go consumers are happy to purchase small ticket items like pizza and movie tickets, for example.

One market that has shown strong signs of mobile commerce growth is Japan, according to Morgan Stanley.

See also our analysis of mobile payments.

Conclusion

New recommendations technologies make it easier every year for consumers to find what they want, social media has driven a lot of retail activity to small websites and social networks, and mobile commerce has slowly but surely gained a foothold in e-commerce.

These are just some of the trends in e-commerce over the past 10 years. While Amazon.com and eBay continue to be the giants of online retail, the Social Web and advances in web technology have both had a big impact this decade.

See also:

• Online Retail Thriving: 8% Growth Expected This Holiday Season
• Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music
• Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapup by RSS or by email (form below).

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Web Trends

Obama: "I Have Never Used Twitter"

Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students this week at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse's Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July. President Obama has never used Twitter, despite his account being the most followed there.

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.

How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years (Stats)

Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.

Unfriending: Are People Online Shedding Friends? (Debate)

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year this week. Its selection? unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook. Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. Marshall Kirkpatrick disagrees with him. Both make their cases in this post and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.

The Top 10 Mobile Applications of 2012

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Google Sites Offers Templates; Claims It's Easier Than Sharepoint

Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting this week, Google will provide templates that make it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets. Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Future of Music Coalition's Brian Zisk: The Do's of Streaming Music

In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they'd been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today's music environment.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

The Google Chrome OS Press Event

Google held a press event this week outlining more details about its Google Chrome OS. Google plans to launch Chrome OS next year. Google is positioning Chrome OS as "just a browser" - that is, all of your data is in the cloud. Chrome OS will be focused on speed, simplicity, security; every application on Chrome OS will be a web application. Google sees Chrome OS as targeting 3 trends: netbooks, cloud (everything is a web app today), phones getting computing capabilities.

Twitter.com Is Still the Most Popular Twitter Client - TweetDeck a Distant Second

Twitter's own homepage is still the most popular tool for users to update their status on Twitter. Around 46% of all updates are made directly on the site. Social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos analyzed 500 million tweets it collected over the past 5 months and found that TweetDeck is the most popular third-party client. TweetDeck has a comfortable lead with a 8.48% share of the market, followed by Tweetie, Twitterific and Seesmic.

A Central Nervous System for Earth: HP's Ambitious Sensor Network

HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). It's a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors."

Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects

Microsoft Live Labs' latest creation has just launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks impressive and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.

Droid Becomes Fastest-Selling Android Phone to Date

The Motorola Droid is the newest smartphone on the market to compete for the iPhone's crown. Released by Verizon Wireless on November 6th, the Droid's advertising campaign has been a full-frontal attack on the popular Apple smartphone with a heavy focus on what the iPhone doesn't do. "iDon't run simultaneous apps, iDon't have a real keyboard, iDon't take 5-megapixel pictures," taunts Verizon's Droid ad.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.

Think you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is here and Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real time this week, too.

See also: How to Use Tumblr, Posterous and Other Light Blogging Services

Topify

Ever feel frustrated by the emails you get from Twitter? We did, until we signed up for Topify. From really smart "X is now following you" emails to the ability to reply to direct messages by email - Topify delivers Twitter emails like Twitter ought to. It's another project from Ouriel Ohayon, who's also behind the wonderful iPhone app sharing service AppsFire. Ouriel makes cool stuff.

See also: Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next

Seesmic Web

The never-ending battle between Seesmic and Tweetdeck to see who can make the coolest Twitter client is great for users. Tweetdeck ate my groups last night in an upgrade, after I'd spent hours building them, and so I decided to give Seesmic another try. The Seesmic Web app is awesome and Mac users can turn it into its own app on the desktop using Fluid. The best of many cool features? List support! You can turn any list you're following on Twitter into its own column in Seesmic. Frederic Lardinois says he's been using this combo for a few weeks, I still have some kinks to work out.

See also: Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future (From 18 months ago, how did our prediction turn out?)

Tweetie 2

The iPhone app Tweetie (iTunes link) made a major upgrade last month and we're loving it. Sarah Perez put this one on the list but everyone agrees - this is hot stuff. Will the forthcoming Seesmic Mobile app be as good? Will Tweetdeck's eventual support for Twitter lists turn into an awesome iPhone app? We'll see - but Tweetie's many rich features make it the app to beat right now. My favorite feature? The way the replies page can be pulled down like a spring to prompt a refresh. It's a little thing, but it's fun.

See also: The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars

Aardvark

Aardvark leverages what it calls "the real-time web of people" to deliver answers to any question you have - from people in your social circle who know about the topic and are available at that very moment. Vark gets mixed reviews from some people, but I love it. From technical questions to practical ones about life to opinions about questions I have at work - I've been getting a lot of fast, helpful information from people on Aardvark lately. It's another app that scores very high on User Experience, especially in its iPhone and IM interfaces.

See also: The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing 3 New Cyborg Q&A Services

Chrome/Chromium

Google's web browser is fast, it's really fast. It's hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful Firefox extensions we've been using for years - but it's harder to use any other browser once you've been using Chrome for awhile. We have high hopes for Chrome plug-ins, but even without them it's a joy to use. You can download Chrome for Windows here and Chromium for Mac here.

LazyFeed

LazyFeed is a topic-driven "discovery engine." It's basically a blog search client that brings in the freshest posts about topics you're interested in. A couple of months into using it, I'm still finding great content every time I fire it up. I've got this running in Fluid and it works great.

Want some serendipity on the iPhone? Try out competitor YourVersion's app. The first version isn't easy on the eyes, but it delivers roughly the same experience on the go.

See also: Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action

Those are some of our favorites lately. What apps have you fallen in love with this season? We'd love to know.

See also our previous installments in this series:
30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using One Month After Finding Them From one year ago!
Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later From this Spring.
What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC) Video screencasts.

We're starting with online music. No industry, except arguably the newspaper one, has been rocked (pardon the pun) more by the Internet than the music industry.

The online music decade started with Napster, a music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning that operated between June 1999 and July 2001. Napster enabled people to freely share MP3 files over the Internet; however it quickly ran into major legal trouble. Napster was the subject of lawsuits in 2000 by touchy metal band Metallica and others. It was eventually shut down by court order, after several major record labels went after the service.

After Napster's demise, a P2P application called Kazaa became the most popular service for music file sharing. But it too eventually succumbed to record industry attacks.

Curiously, both Napster and Kazaa were recently reincarnated as law-abiding services. After years of re-launch attempts, Napster was acquired by Best Buy in September 2008 and was born again in May 2009. Meanwhile Kazaa turned into a legit music subscription service in July this year.

iTunes / iPod: Digital Music Goes Commercial

While Napster and Kazaa tried to skirt around the commercial imperatives of music, like paying artists, Apple took on the record industry in an entirely legal way. In January 2001, Apple launched a digital music player for music called iTunes. Then in April 2003, the iTunes Store was launched. It offered the ability to buy songs for 99 cents each, which had a major impact on the music industry.

Soon after Napster's demise in 2001, Apple launched what was to become a revolutionary device in the music industry. The iPod was launched in October 2001 and it became the most popular portable music player since the Sony Walkman in the 1980s.

Fast forward to 2009 and iTunes continues to evolve. In January Apple announced that iTunes would go DRM-free. In September 2009 Apple launched version 9 of iTunes, which included a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and 'iTunes LPs' - a feature that brings liner notes and artwork to digital albums.

MySpace: Music & Social Networking

MySpace was launched in August 2003 and soon became a popular hangout for local bands, especially indie rockers. MySpace provided a way for those bands to promote their music and reach a wide network through social networking.

As ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez wrote last month, it was a virtuous circle for MySpace. The bands' presence on MySpace "began to attract a young, hip crowd of users who were interested in following pop culture, and, in particular, the up-and-coming artists they discovered while browsing through the network. Only eight months after its launch, MySpace began to experience exponential growth, as its users created profiles and friended others who would then, in turn, invite more users to join the social network. Thanks to the "network effect," MySpace soon became the place to be online. Everyone was there."

However by 2008, MySpace had ceded the social networking crown to Facebook. In 2009, MySpace is once again trying to reclaim its heritage as a music service. In October MySpace launched "Artist Dashboards" and integrated its music video vault with recent acquisition iLike.

Pandora & last.fm: Online Music Discovery

Online music services have flourished in the 'web 2.0' era, when the ability to find new music and share it with others via the Web became increasingly sophisticated.

Two services in particular stand out. One is Pandora, a free online music discovery service. Pandora was founded in 2000 and continues to grow, despite various legal issues over the years. As ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois noted earlier this year, Pandora derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes.

Last.fm is another online music discovery service. It was founded in 2002 and was sold to CBS in 2007. It continues to innovate in 2009, for example in May this year last.fm announced combo stations, allowing a user to create a station with up to three artists or tags.

Conclusion

This post and series was inspired by one of my favorite blogs and podcasts, NPR's All Songs Considered. They're currently looking back at the decade in music and much of the discussion is about how the Internet helped define it.

And it's true, when you think of music at the end of 2009 you think of iTunes, Pandora and last.fm - MySpace even. The record industry is still coming to terms with these and other changes.

Tell us your online music memories of the past 10 years. What's been your favorite online music product or service during that time?

Over the course of the year, there have been countless reports - some more substantial than others - but all with the same message: Generation Y is just not interested in Twitter. The reports generally cited members of this demographic as saying Twitter was "pointless" and "narcissistic."

Apparently, that's beginning to change. Well, maybe not their perception of Twitter, but certainly their use of it. Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace's is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and, as noted above, Facebook is 33.

When looking at specific younger demographic segments, and not just Gen Y, you can see strong Twitter uptake over the past year. For example, 37% of those 18-24 now use Twitter when only 19% did back in December 2008. And in the slightly older 25-34 bracket, a portion of which could still be considered Gen Y, 31% are now using the service compared to only 20% in December of last year. Combined, these two groups account for more than half of Twitter's network.

Why is Gen Y Now Flocking to Twitter?

So what gives? Why has Gen Y seemingly changed their minds about the social microblogging network that only months ago they avoided? A recent AP article offered up some ideas including the influx of celebrity tweeters, pressure from teachers or bosses, and it even hinted that Gen Y'ers entering the workplace have found value in the network for business-related purposes. That same sentiment was shared by Meredith Sires of Gen Y trend-watching site, YPulse. She theorizes that the rapid growth in the 18-24 demographic has to do more with the recent college graduates segment of that group finding ways to build entirely new online contact lists and create new identities more closely tied to information-sharing.

However, there have not been any in-depth studies that detail all the various reasons that Gen Y has chosen to adopt the microblogging network. To date, everything cited consists of just theories and speculations based on anecdotal evidence. But while all the ideas have merit, the theory that rings truest to our ears is the one put forth by Craig Watkins, a University of Texas professor and author of the book "The Young and the Digital." He says that what we're seeing is "...a kind of closing of that generational gap as it relates to technology." In other words, young and old alike are joining the same networks and socializing in the same spaces.

At this point, we would have to agree. After all, Gen Y (or Gen Z for that matter), hasn't all of a sudden flocked to some new social networking site where the majority of the online user base mostly consists of their peers. Although some niche sites like FML, Failblog, TextsFromLastNight, and Sporcle have apparently attracted this young crowd, their numbers are dwarfed by those of Facebook, Twitter, and the like. It seems as if Gen Y is simply content to join the older adults on the top social networks of today and not strike out on their own...and vice versa. The older social networking users, in turn, never really set up shop on networks designed just for them like the (now "hibernating") Boomj, a social network for baby boomers, or the online old folks home eons.com. They, too, have gravitated towards Facebook and Twitter.

Will this ever change? Will there ever be another network dominated by the digital youth? Of course no one can know for sure, but odds are that unless it's a closed-off network where entry is barred to those over a certain age, any new social network will have trouble keeping the grown-ups out these days. And even if some such network ever sprang into existence, it may struggle to attract the Gen Y members it desires - especially since they're so content to socialize on the sites they already use. And now that they've added Twitter to that list, the challenge to draw them away to yet another social networking site may prove even more difficult than before.

Note: statistics in this article are from Pew Internet's Recent Report on Twitter for Fall 2009

Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web? Will it lead to the same uniformity and lowest common denominator content that afflicts the television industry?

Answers.com Rolling in Page Views, Money

Answers.com, which we reviewed in August, garnered 56.4 Million monthly unique visitors in the United States in September (83M worldwide). For context, that puts it on a similar level as CBS Interactive (#12 with 58M uniques in U.S.) and Apple (#11 with 60M). Demand Media, which we also reviewed in August, was close behind with 52.5M uniques in September.

Answers.com announced its Q3 2009 financial results today. It made $4.99 million in revenue in that quarter, including $1.9M in September alone. The Q3 09 result was an increase of 40% compared to $3.56 million in Q3 2008. Most of the 09 revenues were from WikiAnswers, which reported $3.42 million in Q3 2009 - an increase of 75% compared to $1.96 million in Q3 2008.

WikiAnswers is the main reason for Answers.com's popularity. It is a Q&A site driven by user-generated content. And it's growing fast. Bob Rosenschein, Founder, Chairman & CEO of Answers.com, left a comment on our earlier post saying that "the growth in our traffic is almost entirely from our WikiAnswers site."

In September, WikiAnswers garnered 46.3 million U.S. unique visitors and ReferenceAnswers 21.4 million U.S. unique visitors (note there is some crossover between the two sites, hence those numbers are greater than the unduplicated total of 56.4M).

Low-Cost Content Production On A Massive Scale

There are two interesting aspects to the success of Answers.com. Firstly, it has a huge number of pages on the Web now: 38 million as of today. Much of that is user-generated content, so very low cost.

Secondly, Answers.com's page view and financial success is almost entirely created off the back of Google. Indeed, Answers.com announced recently that it has renewed its Google Services Agreement - extending its access to Google AdSense for two more years. Bob Rosenschein, CEO of Answers.com, is quoted as saying that "we earn the vast majority of our ad revenue from Google's sponsored links."

Now consider the implications of this for the future of content on the Web. The recent rapid ascensions of Answers.com and Demand Media can only really lead to one conclusion: to succeed in the content business on the Web, you should pump out hundreds of pages of content every day - preferably thousands.

Now, this is nothing new. We've known for a long time that blog success is more easily gained (gamed?) by producing far more posts per day than any one person can read. This has led to many professional blogs competing with each other on how many posts they can put up every day - usually accompanied by a slide in quality.

As well as producing as much content as possible, Answers.com and Demand Media also have a low cost structure in common with blogs. But they are taking the 'quantity rules' approach to a whole new level. This is low-cost content production done on a huge scale.

Just how much content do these two sites have on the Web? There's an easy way to find out: search Google. Here is the amount of content each has, along with some other sites for comparison:

• wikipedia.org: 56,000,000
• answers.com: 37,700,000 (of which wiki.answers.com accounts for 34,100,000)
• nytimes.com: 13,200,000
• washingtonpost.com: 12,500,000
• ehow.com: 4,850,000 (this is Demand Media's lead site)
• huffingtonpost.com: 4,740,000
• mashable.com: 210,000
• techcrunch.com: 124,000
• readwriteweb.com: 37,700

Answers.com has nearly 38 million pages of content on the Web. Much of it is discovered via Google; and monetized via Google. Wikipedia still has more content, but it is a non-profit world encyclopedia. Answers.com is a commercial company, out to make money.

Demand Media is well behind Answers.com (and Wikipedia), but there's reason to believe it will ramp up fast. In August the company told us that it produces 2,000 pieces of content per day, across its network of sites [Update, 7 Nov 09: it's now 4,000, Demand Media told us]. It also has a slick content production 'studio' system, which we will explore in our next post.

Interesting to note that Huffington Post is really the closest the blog world has to a player in this 'mega content' space - but then most of the site's content comes from aggregating it from other sites. Huffington Post has been criticized by the New York Times in particular for this practice.

Note that the New York Times and the Washington Post clearly both have a lot of content too - but they also have a lot of well-paid staff. Answers.com and Demand Media are producing content at a fraction of the price that the NYT and the WP pay for it.

The Age of Mega Content Sites - Where Is This Headed?

On the Web, traditionally success has been measured by page views. This isn't always the case - there's certainly a place for quality over quantity, a philosophy which we at ReadWriteWeb firmly believe in! But by and large, big page views usually means big revenue... or at least the promise of it (e.g. in Facebook's case).

Both Answers.com and Demand Media are onto a good thing. They have different approaches - Answers.com is largely user-generated content combined with Wikipedia and other sources; Demand Media has created a low-cost content factory, by employing thousands of freelancers.

Google is largely keeping both companies in business - it is the source of most of their traffic (because a lot of it is reference or resource content) and certainly in Answers.com's case it provides the bulk of its revenue.

I can't help but think that the rapid rise of these two companies may be bad news for the Web. If a small number of companies come to dominate a content market, usually blandness and lowest common denominator fare follows. The network television and radio markets in almost any country in the world are evidence of that. Likewise, if you search Google for a reference article and the first page of results is littered with Answers.com and Demand Media articles, is that crowding out the real topic experts?

Are these mega content sites a good or bad thing for the Web? Is quality taking too much of a back seat to quantity? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Really?

If you're an iPhone owner yourself, you're probably going to be taken a bit aback by these findings. For example, the study claims that "cool gadgets" make a person three times more attractive to an iPhone owner than a college degree. Meanwhile "old" gadgets are a turnoff to one in three iPhone users. And yet, if that person spends a little too much time with said gadgets, one in four iPhone owners will break up with them. One in three will do it via email or text message.

Taken on their own, it's hard to say whether these stats are indicative of anything about iPhone owners specifically, or if they could apply to any group of smartphone-owning mobile users. That's why the report compares the iPhone and Blackberry owners on each topic. When studied this way, iPhone owners beat Blackberry owners in every category where "winning" is actually the equivalent of being a materialistic, flaky, fickle dolt...well, at least in our opinion.

To spin the findings even further in Blackberry's favor, one of the questions involved asking the mobile users how they "see" themselves. 40% of the iPhone owners claimed they were an "intellectual" while only 36% of Blackberry users said the same. Propped up against the other results, it's an almost laughable claim.

Don't Buy this Hype

Clearly, this survey wasn't meant to be an in-depth examination of the smartphone toting population - in fact, it's more likely just a publicity stunt to generate talk about Retrevo. Given the questions asked, there were bound to be some "rather interesting" findings, no matter how the respondents answered. And by keeping the sample size to a low number - only 445 individuals - there's no guarantee that these folks are representative of the population at large in any way. After all, who signs up for online surveys anyway? While the panel of participants was distributed across gender, age, income and location in the U.S., what's undisclosed is how the questions were asked - was this done scientifically or were they leading questions designed to generate these sorts of results?  We'd bet on the latter.

Still, you have to wonder if there isn't a tiny bit of truth hiding in these numbers somewhere. Could it be that those who buy Apple's smartphone are a little more wrapped up in mobile life than those whose smartphone purchase probably had more to do with accessing company email in a timely fashion? That may be possible, but that wouldn't exactly be an incredible reveal if so, now would it?

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Web Trends

Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

Mobile Web's Explosive Growth

Mobile ad firm AdMob has revealed the dramatic changes the mobile industry has seen in their latest Mobile Metrics Report. It was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone in America. One year later and half of the top ten are touchscreen devices, six include Wi-Fi capabilities, and six have mobile application stores. And as you would expect, this new crop of super-powered phones are making heavy use of the mobile web.

Why Aren't VCs Backing Augmented Reality?

Some people believe that Augmented Reality (AR), the class of technologies that place images or data on top of other views of the physical world, could be the web browser of the future. AR has rocketed out of the research labs and is catching mass market interest fast - e.g. mobile phones displaying restaurant reviews when you look through your phone's camera. Why then are VCs not investing more in Augmented Reality? Here are three reasons why we think investment in this sector has been slow so far.

Facebook Announces Roadmap for Developers

This week Facebook published a developer roadmap outlining upcoming relevant changes and a rough timeline for each. Changes include developer access to user emails, more prominent app displays on user profiles, all-new homepage dashboards for apps and games, and improvements to Open Graph and Analytics APIs. Read on for details and screenshots of the new faces of Facebook apps.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Calendaring, Scheduling Meetings: Timebridge CEO Interview Reveals Strategic Importance of This Space

We have looked at Calendaring many times (such as in our round-up of 10 players). In our own work, we have started working with both Tungle and Doodle. To understand more about why this market is strategically interesting, we recently spoke with Yori Nelken, CEO of Timebridge (see our previous coverage here).

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Paul Graham: Priority Access to Twitter Is Practical Necessity

If hardcore hackers had any doubts whether the real-time web was a legitimate development environment, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham is dispelling them. In an interview with Graham, ReadWriteWeb learned that the entrepreneur-turned-investor issued a "Request for Startups" (RFS) asking for ideas from companies utilizing Twitter and Justin.tv's live video API. Groups who are accepted to Y-Combinator and fall under these categories will be given "priority access" to Twitter and Justin.tv.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Google Wave Use Cases: Education

Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a 'Preview' product shortly after and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September. Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? We started this series by looking at the education sector.

What are Hulu's Mysterious Plans?

Everyone is looking to Hulu as the future of Internet TV. A joint venture between several major networks, Hulu delivers free, ad-supported programming via online streams - an untested model for long-term profitability, at least when it comes to television. While consumers have been enjoying the service since its launch in 2007, recent statements by a News Corp exec have people wondering: can Hulu make the ad-supported model work? Or does the company have other plans?

Google Launches Music Search: Partners with MySpace, Lala, Gracenote and Others

This week Google announced the launch of Google Music. This new service is powered by Lala and MySpace's iLike. Other partners include Gracenote, iMeem, Pandora and Rhapsody. Google has also partnered with the major music labels: EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. Through Lala and iLike, Google will also be able to feature music from a large number of independent labels.

Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs

Social Search went live in Google Labs this week. Google announced that it was working on this Social Search feature at the Web 2.0 Summit last week. Social Search taps into a user's social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user's own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.

Brizzly Adds Facebook - Aims to be The Blogger.com of Social Media

Brizzly wants to be to microblogging what Blogger.com was to blogging five years ago. Currently, Brizzly offers a user-friendly browser-based interface for Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook integration went live this weekand more social media applications will be added as the product evolves. Brizzly shares much of the same philosophy as Blogger. It's simple to use and aims to make microblogging easy to understand and use by a mainstream audience.

Currently Brizzly is in private beta, but ReadWriteWeb has scored 2000 invites for our readers to test it out! (see the post for the code).

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Among the devices making the heaviest use of the mobile web are the iPhone and its non-smartphone counterpart, the iPod Touch. The data traffic created by these two handhelds has increased 19 times from September 2008 to this past month and now accounts for 43% of all smartphone requests worldwide. In the U.S., that percentage is even slightly higher, with iPhone traffic accounting for nearly half (48%) of all smartphone requests.

Apple devices (iPhone and iPod Touch) also claim the top two spots on both the U.S. and the worldwide charts of top handsets. However, feature phones like the RAZR v3 and Samsung's R450 are still making the top ten list as well and account for 60% of ad requests in the U.S. - a figure that's likely due to the unlimited data plans available with each of these devices.

Key Takeaway #2: Watch Out! Android is Rising Fast

Now climbing up the charts, Google's Android, the newcomer to the mobile operating system game, is beginning to have an impact on mobile web traffic as well. From August to September of 2009, the percentage of smartphone traffic generated by devices running the Android OS grew a whopping 13% over the course of the month. That's a dramatic increase in such a short period of time and gives credence to recent reports that Android is poised to become the number two smartphone in the worldwide market. While still far behind the iPhone OS in terms of traffic with only 17% of U.S. traffic and only 10% of traffic worldwide, Google's mobile OS is already beating out competitors like RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices, and Windows Mobile. It has also claimed two spots on the top 10 chart of handset models in the U.S with the HTC Dream coming in at number 3 and the HTC Magic coming in at number 10. Worldwide, the Dream is also number 3, but the Magic only makes it to spot number 15.

Key Takeaway #3: Outside of U.S., Mobile Web Strong in India, Indonesia, U.K., Philippines

When looking at the number of ad requests by country, the U.S. is still dominating with 47.3% of all requests coming from the States. The next nearest country, India, only comes in at 6.5%. Rounding out the top five are Indonesia, the U.K., and the Philippines. These numbers point to heavy mobile web use in each of these countries as compared with the rest of the world.

When grouped by larger regions, North America is number one with 49.5% of requests, most of that from the U.S., and the second largest region is Asia, accounting for 25.3% of requests. Western Europe, Africa, and Latin America follow with 9.4%, 5.3% and 5.0% respectively.

Looking at just percentage increases in traffic growth, a different picture appears. Latin America is showing a large percent increase year-over-year at 0.6%, second only to North America's 1.1%. Other regions in the top five, while still accounting for large numbers of requests, actually saw slight decreases in growth (less than 0.5%) over the past year.

Smartphones are Taking Over, Mobile Web Grows

While none of the data included in this report is all that surprising, it's interesting to see actual numbers put to the reported trends. We can now see the disproportionate amount of web surfing done by iPhone users, no doubt thanks to the phone's Safari web browser, a vast improvement over the browsers included in many other mobile devices on the market.

It's also worth noting how fast Android is moving up the charts right now. It could very well be the next contender to the smartphone crown, especially given the company's plans to continue spreading its OS across numerous devices worldwide. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently declared, "Android adoption is about to explode." Also, AdMob noted on an earlier blog entry that there are already 12 Android phones available through 32 carriers in 26 countries. By the time they release their next Mobile Metrics report, those numbers are sure to have increased.

What all this means to the consumer is that smartphones are now edging out feature phones as the devices of choice. More phones than ever come with the advanced capabilities like touchscreens, full-featured web browsers, and Wi-Fi. With features like these, more people will begin to surf the mobile web and download mobile applications. This, in turn, will drive related changes in mobile platforms, communication, e-Commerce, and more, all of which are bound to see similar upward trends over the coming months.

Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? Let's start with the education sector. We'll explore other use cases in upcoming posts.

A quick reminder of what Google Wave is. In a nutshell, Google Wave is a new form of real-time communications. Google describes it as "equal parts conversation and document." In our first 'hands-on' post at the beginning of June, we described it as "real-time email with a big dose of IM built-in" - although we noted that "this only describes a small part of what Wave can do."

In a recent CNN profile, Wave creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen described it as making email "collaborative and instant."

Wave in Class

After searching some public 'waves,' we came across an educational wave. Entitled 'Wave in Class,' this wave was started by Loren Baum (a self-described "collaborative learning enthusiast" and graduate student at Ben Gurion University) and Sam Boland (a Politics student and "Tech Enthusiast" at Occidental College, Los Angeles).

The wave was started to explore concepts like "Collaborative Note Taking" and "Wave as a Debate Host." Nearly 100 people are included in the wave, ranging from teachers to PhD students to IT professionals to high school students.

This particular wave was framed at the start as being "a set of collaborative documents, supported by a chat."

As a note-taking tool, Samuel Boland wrote that "there appears to be a concensus that this [Google Wave] will work as a note-taking tool, the only disagreement is over how to implement it." Options for note-taking include voluntary extra-curricular groups, rotating in-class groups and small in-class groups.

A few users enthused later in the wave that "Google Wave combines a lot of the best features from different applications" - but with a real-time twist. It was noted that while Google Docs can be used to share notes and collaborate on assignments, with Google Wave students can collaborate in real-time. This could be important in education for things like notetaking, asking questions (a.k.a. a backchannel) and collaborative projects.

Another feature of Wave that would be useful for education purposes, according to this 100-person wave, is the play-back ability - "so instructors can see exactly who did what, and see the progression of ideas."

Will Wave Make Students Lazy?

One concern that seemed to pop up several times in the wave was that Google Wave could make it too easy for lazy students to get by. As Justin Neitzey succinctly put it: "I don't think kids should be allowed piggy back off the work of others."

This is a similar concern that some in the education system had with Wolfram Alpha, another innovative Web tool that is set to change the way education is delivered.

Manny Guendulay responded that "reading those notes and participating in the collaboration of those notes hold totally different of levels of thinking." He argued that "the person simply reading the notes (passively learning) has no chance to perform at the same level as someone who helped collaborate (active learning) on those notes, or even watched and read along while they were being created."

In other words, engaging with Google Wave - and the Web in general in fact - will lead to smarter, better performing students. That sounds reasonable to us, but time will tell for both Google Wave and Wolfram Alpha on that score.

Conclusion

Overall, it is clear that Google Wave has potential to be very useful in the education system, particularly as a real-time collaborative note-taking tool. Three students experimented with just that in a lecture; the resulting notes were said to be "more complete" than if Wave hadn't been used.

If you're interested in exploring other education waves, check these out:

• Higher Ed Directory (meta)
• Software Roles in Education - a structured, goal driven exploration
• Wave for Notes - about note taking
• Student-side Class Management: a Wave template

Currently Brizzly is in private beta, but ReadWriteWeb has scored 2000 invites for our readers to test it out! (see the bottom of this post for the code).

Features, Including New Facebook Support

Brizzly is a self-described "social media reader." It's a browser-based service, like Blogger.com. Today Brizzly added Facebook as the second service it supports, after Twitter. Facebook users will be able to view and update their status, wall posts, comments and likes using Brizzly.

Brizzly is similar to Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr (not all of them currently support Facebook though). However power users won't see much reason to switch, as Brizzly doesn't have the advanced features of those products. And that's the point.

The feature set of Brizzly aims to make microblogging a simple and seamless experience for users. For example instead of having to click links to view media such as photos and videos, Brizzly puts those items inline in the user's stream. Another example: Direct Messaging via Twitter has a UI (user interface) very similar to Instant Messaging, which many mainstream users will be familiar with.

Brizzly in 2009 = Blogger in 2003

Brizzly shares much of the same philosophy as Blogger. It's simple to use and aims to make microblogging easy to understand and use by a mainstream audience. This seems like a great strategy. Back in 2003, blogging was at a similar stage in its adoption as microblogging is today - passionately used by early Internet adopters, but not fully understood by a wider audience.

The popular Twitter clients circa 2009 include TweetDeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr. Those are great apps and no self-respecting Web geek would be caught without at least one of them. However it's unlikely that your brother or sister, let alone Mom or Pop, is using those products. Brizzly wants to be the service that introduces your family and friends to the world of microblogging and social media.

Jason Shellen, who RWW readers may also recognize as a creator of Google Reader, was at The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit in October. Jolie O'Dell interviewed him about about filtration and discovery on the real-time web. Shellen mentioned that mainstream users probably won't use hashtags to tag their tweets. He noted (at about the 3 minute mark in the video) that "most people are not going to do that [hashtags], so it needs to evolve into a different type of filtration." One of Brizzly's goals is to make hashtags and other "geeky" social media concepts simple for mainstream users to understand.

Less Noise

Regular people often struggle to see the value in Twitter and other social media apps. Web app developers need to find ways to convince people that behind the noise of social media, there is tremendous value.

So how does Brizzly compare to the now Facebook-owned FriendFeed, an aggregation service that early adopters love but most others think is information overload? I spoke to Jason Shellen at the RWW Summit about that. He told me that Brizzly won't blend services together like FriendFeed. It will keep them separate (Twitter, Facebook, other services that are added over time), in order to maintain simplicity.

Conclusion

All in all, we're impressed by the vision of Brizzly and we think it has a good chance of hitting the same wide user base that Blogger.com so successfully tapped. It's fair to say that power users will probably be a little disappointed by Brizzly - but you're not the target audience.

INVITE CODE: ReadWriteWeb readers can access the private beta of Brizzly by signing up using the code "rwwsentme" or clicking here. There are 2000 invites available.

Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we've excerpted 6 minutes that we believe is of interest to anyone who's touched by the web.

Highlighted comments include:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• "We're starting to make significant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video.

• "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"
• It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

There's lots more in the full 45 minutes of Schmidt's interview, including a statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use.

That's the roadmap, though, that's guiding much of what Google is doing today. From Chrome OS to Google Social Search.

Does that sound like a compelling vision of the future? Not discussed were distributed social networking, structured data, recommendations, presence data and other factors that could complicate Google's plans. What do you think the web will look like in five years?

See Also: ReadWriteWeb's Top Trends Defining the Future of the Internet

In September 2006 the News Feed was a radical idea; thousands of Facebook users revolted against the idea that all their friends would be shown every photo they uploaded, when their relationship status changed and other information as soon as it was available. Today we live in a different world. Almost everything is social and the new challenge is tackling information overload. That's what Facebook just did today and it's going to be very important for the future.

Everyone's trying to solve this problem. There are inbox filtering services like ReMail, Threadsy and the experimental new Mozilla Raindrop. There are column filters in stream readers like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Google Reader yesterday introduced a "magic" filter view for the most popular items across the whole network. FriendFeed, a small but innovative social aggregator started by one of the creators of GMail and acquired by Facebook for $50 million this summer, offers a "best of day" view of any stream of updates you're looking at.

That FriendFeed view is the closest thing to the new Facebook News Feed, but a Facebook spokesperson told us that the two products are unrelated.

Everyone's trying to tackle information overload. Step one, get more people sharing information. Step two, figure out how to create a personalized, high-value view of all that information by surfacing the most important updates for each user. Step three, profit!

How It Works

The new News Feed view is based on an algorithm that scores every update coming in through what's now called the Live Feed. That scoring is based on the number of "likes" and comments an item has received and how much you personally have interacted with the update's author in the past.

A related algorithm was used in the past to create the "highlights" section on the right-hand side of the Facebook home page. That section was getting too little interaction and didn't include things like important status updates, the company says. If your sister posted a status update saying that she's pregnant, a Facebook spokesperson told us today, that wouldn't show up in the old highlights view. It should show up in your News Feed now.

So three big changes: 1. The new Live Feed is linked-to at the top of the page and shows a number of new items since your last visit. 2. Highlights plus hot status updates are now the default, the new News Feed. 3. Birthdays and other important events have taken the place of the old Highlights section; they are of particular interest to users and will now be easier to see.

What It Means

Facebook says that after viewing your new News Feed, you can go check out the raw Live Stream of all the most recent updates from your contacts. That's the opposite of the way FriendFeed did it and neither strategy should be taken for granted. Decisions like this impact a major method of communication for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

By showing the News Feed highlights as the default view, Facebook will probably encourage users to pay more attention to, interact with more and grow closer to the people they already have a history of interacting with and the events that are already popular. Weak social connections and your personal long-tail of content are less prioritized in this view.

The inclusion of a user's past behavior as a criteria for hotness is key, though. It's not just a popularity contest. Your News Feed is your little universe and popularity is defined in relative terms.

That, again, is a particular strategy. The new Google Reader Popular View, for example, appears to evaluate popularity across all users in total.

What It Could Mean In the Future

Someday social networking is going to be like the telephone. Today you can't send messages from Facebook to people on MySpace or LinkedIn but that isn't going to last forever. Just as you can call someone who uses T-Mobile from your Sprint phone, someday sharing and messaging between online social networks will be a given.

How will social networks retain users then? Why stick with Facebook when some smaller service offers a decentralized social networking service outside of Facebook's control but still tied into your friends on Facebook and elsewhere?

These services will someday have to compete on user experience, when they no longer have your social connections locked-in. The service that does the best job filtering up the most important information you have coming your way will likely be the service you stick with. That's going to be a key area of competition between social networks.

How well will Facebook do at filtering the Live Stream of content? We're about to find out and it's going to make a big difference in how we experience the web. That will only be more true as more and more people begin publishing content.

There's been a lot of emphasis on the live stream of real-time web content, but Facebook now joins many other services in recognizing that the best value is sometimes built by combining real time and slower assets.

Meeker's presentation noted that financial markets have rebounded and that the technology sector is now "relatively impressive." Let's start by explaining how 2009 is different to previous years.

Tim O'Reilly noted yesterday in his conference opening that the "[Web] revolution we're seeing today is as great as the one we saw five years ago." Mary Meeker had an interesting slide that touched on a similar point - although the dates don't quite match. O'Reilly compared 2009 to 2004. Meeker pointed to statistics showing that growth in the technology sector in 2009 has the same pattern as 2001.

If we correlate O'Reilly's comments with Meeker's, it may not be until 2011 that we see a new era of the Web. In other words, what we're seeing in 2009 is the beginning of a recovery - but it will take a couple more years until the full impact is seen. That makes sense if we view mobile as the key driver of the next Web era, because mobile certainly is very young in its growth curve in the U.S. (it's more mature of course in Asia and Europe).

Mobile Social Networking

One of the points on slide 2 is that platforms that combine social networking with mobile will drive "unprecedented change in communications + commerce." That statement seems a little hyperbolic, but we have undeniably seen an uptick in usage this year of companies like Foursquare, Loopt and Brightkite. Later in the presentation, Meeker predicted that Facebook will be a major player in this market in the near future.

We reported back in March that Foursquare was one of the highlights of the SXSW Interactive event in Austin, Texas. This is the same event where Twitter first generated buzz back in 2007. While it's too early to call Foursquare the 'Twitter of mobile social networking,' it's worth keeping an eye on that app in particular - given Meeker's prediction.

Later in slide 36, Meeker noted the importance of location-based services.

Device Explosion

Another key point in Meeker's presentation was that Internet connected devices will proliferate over the coming years.

In slide 40, Meeker wrote:

"Mobile devices will evolve as remote controls for ever expanding types of real-time cloud-based services, including emerging category of location-based services, creating opportunities + dislocations, empowering consumers in unprecedented + transformative ways."

Apple Leading the Charge

In slide 39, Meeker wrote that Apple is the leading hardware and software company currently in the mobile Internet market:

"Near term, Apple is driving the platform change to mobile computing. Its mobile ecosystem (iPhone + iTouch + iTunes + accessories + services) market share / impact should surprise on upside for at least the next 1-2 years.

Long term, emerging markets competition, open mobile web (paced by likes of Google Android) and carrier limitations pose challenges. RIM likely to maintain enterprise lead for 1-2 years owing to installed base."

In the next slide, Meeker claimed that the iphone/itouch ecosystem exhibited the "fastest hardware user growth in consumer tech history."

The Growth of Facebook, YouTube & Twitter

We all know that these three services have experienced large growth over the past few years. Slide 42 summarizes that.

Also note the emergence of Demand Media, which we reviewed earlier this year. We met with Demand Media again yesterday, so a new analysis post is coming soon on this fascinating new media company.

Conclusion

Overall, we at ReadWriteWeb agree with Morgan Stanley that mobile is going to continue to ramp up considerably.

However we think that other trends - such as Internet of Things and real-time Web - were overlooked by Meeker. You can continue to track those and other emerging Internet trends here on our blog.

Also, while we agree that mobile social networking will be a big trend, we think it's likely that a brand new service will emerge as a major winner in that field. So Facebook may not be the major player, as Morgan Stanley implies in its report. Foursquare may be the big winner, or it could be something completely new. Twitter came out of left field a couple of years ago and it's now a dominant topic of conversation at the Web 2.0 Summit. What New Thing will we be talking about in 2 years time? Let us know in the comments!

Lead photo: O'Reilly Conferences