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Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

At the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit 2011, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor took the stage for a brief 15 minute interview and talked about the social network's underlying principles, how it compares to Google Plus and whether users really know how much they're sharing.

"I think the people who use Facebook a lot are very, very aware of privacy settings. They know exactly what their current boyfriend or ex can see," he said. "As our service has grown, there's a lot of increasing scrutiny on how we provide our service. If we can make your privacy controls so transparent that you are comfortable with sharing data on Facebook, that's good."

After lunch at Web 2.0 today, John Battelle interviewed Vic Gundotra and Sergey Brin of Google. The topic was Google Plus, and Gundotra cleared up some of the key questions about the new social network, which now has 40 million users. Google Apps users are not counted among those millions, but Gundotra confirmed that they will be "in a matter of days."

But more importantly, Gundotra announced that "we plan to support pseudonyms in the future," a surprising turnaround of the terse dismissals of user identity advocates in the past. On Monday, Chris Poole slammed Google for failing to understand how identity on the Web should work. Today was the first admission that Google Plus would eventually support pseudonymous users.

At today's Web 2.0 conference, Bit.ly Chief Scientist Hilary Mason reminded us that what we share is only a part of what we're clicking. Her talk delved into the difference between the links we're sharing versus the links we're just clicking and most likely reading, and also took a look at the ways topics are discussed differently based on geography. The real focus of the talk was centered on what happens between identity and privacy, that space where the secrets of our subconscious come out.

This morning at Web 2.0, David Barnes, program director of emerging technologies of IBM, spoke about the company's vision of smarter cities and a smarter planet. It's a more literal notion of "big data," one that involves sensors everywhere to measure the living, breathing planet. Most Web 2.0 presenters have talked about user data from Web services. This is about the whole planet's user data.

This is the Web in a sense, but it's not about personal computers. IBM wants to build a Web of sensors producing massive amounts of big data for governments, health care providers, first responders and businesses. It wants to measure the weather, the sewers, the vehicles, the buildings and the people. Barnes offered five bullet points about how IBM thinks big data will change the world around us in the next five years.

At the Web 2.0 Summit today, Federated Media Publishing and Automattic, parent company of WordPress, announced an agreement to provide advertising rights for U.S. WordPress.com bloggers. Over 24 million sites are hosted on WordPress.com, and users will now be able to opt into a topically targeted advertising program.

Federated Media positions WordPress advertising as a more focused alternative to social media buys. The campaigns are content-driven, offering sponsored content curation, sponsored posts and semantic conversation targeting for ads.

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Google's SVP of advertising, Susan Wojcicki, announced a new feature for Google Analytics called Flow Visualization. It allows sorting by categories like Web browser or country, and it shows the flow of those various categories from left to right, moving around the site.

It's like a tree of information, with the branches flowing and merging as users move from page to page, action to action. Wojcicki and Phil Mui from the Analytics team also demonstrated real-time analytics, announced last month, along with a premium version of the product. Google also announced nine more languages for Analytics today.

It's the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit, and it's been a great ride. Today's guests are some of the best of the bunch. Mike McCue of Flipboard, Susan Wojcicki at Google and Hilary Mason from bit.ly are here this morning. Then we'll have MC Hammer (yes), Mitchell Baker from Mozilla, and Kevin Rose, founder of Digg and his current venture, Milk.

The afternoon session will bring some of the highlights of the conference. Vic Gundotra, SVP of engineering at Google, will tell us how Google Plus is going in his carefully crafted opinion. We'll hear from Bret Taylor, CTO at Facebook. And Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman at LinkedIn, will talk about some of his new projects. Richard and I will be there with decent-ish seats, but you can watch live below.

This afternoon at Web 2.0, host John Battelle sat down with John Partridge from Visa and Dan Schulman at American Express, to talk about the future of payments. "It's a little bit like having Coke and Pepsi up here," Battelle said.

The unlikely duo discussed how the Web has transformed the industry. Value is shifting constantly, and new opportunities are popping up everywhere. Partridge and Shulman showed repeatedly that sometimes, payment companies are better off partnering rather than competing to create the most value. It was fitting that these two leaders from competing payment processors had such an agreeable conversation.

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.