"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.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Identity Is Prismatic

"The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white," Poole said. "Who you are online is who you are offline." That rosy view of identity is complemented with a similarly oversimplified view of anonymity. People think of anonymity as dark and chaotic, Poole said.

But human identity doesn't work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic."

Choosing Our Own Identities

"We were on the right track at one point," Poole said. In the early days of the Web, its creators used their real names because they were the only people online. As the namespace got more crowded, people started using handles.

AOL Instant Messenger brought screen names to the mainstream. Poole said he agonized over his AOL handle, because he knew it would be a representation of him. That insight persists today at hacker conventions, where the real Web experts hang out. People there introduce themselves with their handles, because that's how they have chosen to identify.

"Twitter does the best job of this" of today's major social networks, Poole said. The platform itself uses handles and allows made-up answers in the real name field. Furthermore, "most of the apps allow multiple accounts. Facebook would never allow this, right?" He says Google Plus is the worst; you don't even get a vanity URL to distinguish yourself, and we all know how Google Plus handles pseudonyms: they delete the accounts.

Google & Facebook Are Eroding Our Options

Google and Facebook are "consolidating identity and making people seem more simple than they really are," Poole said. "Our options are being eroded."

Poole's bottom line is that there's a big market opportunity in this authentic, fluid kind of identity, which the big players are willfully abandoning. "You can incorporate identity without forcing your users to sacrifice something." Poole believes a Web network can validate an account using legitimate services without forcing the presentation of that user to be an over-simplification.

Creativity and self-expression are at stake, Poole says, and he's particularly concerned about young people. Facebook's new Timeline will lock people into their Facebook identities from birth.

Speaking at Facebook recently, Poole told its developers that they set the bar for identity, but he has since realized he was wrong: we, the users, do. "We're about to sacrifice something that's valuable, and it's special."

"I would ask us all to strive for this ideal when we design products, and as users on the Web, what we demand of services," Poole said. "Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want people to think about what the world would be like if we did it right."

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

"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."

Taylor said that power users were the "people who were in college when Facebook was only available to students" and said the company is "very concerned about addressing their needs for nuanced controls and features." But he also said that Facebook has often times gone too far toward complexity.

He also used the used the word "complex" when describing data portability. It's easy to transfer your own data from a single-user service, he said.

"It gets complex with the intersection of several features. And an example of that is the address book on Facebook. If I put my contacts there and put privacy settings on, what are my rights? Should you have the ability to take that data to another site with different privacy?"

When asked about the forthcoming launch of Facebook Timeline, more specifically the activity log, Taylor explained that every piece of content or activity that you've shared on Facebook for all time will be available. "It's a single place on Facebook where you can see all your information," he said, and you can "modify the privacy and the level of control over that experience as much as possible."

And what about Google Plus? Taylor said it's validation of the idea that Facebook was built on, namely that social isn't a destination, but something you integrate into everything.

"Now most of the applications I use on a daily basis, from the news services to music to games, are all integrated with Facebook. My television is integrated with Facebook. My Xbox, I can post the image of my car crashing to Facebook. Facebook is not just a destination: It's personalization, a way to discover apps. Facebook is a large ecosystem that drives discovery."

Taylor Says Smart Friend Lists and the News Feed Will Keep Power Users Engaged

"Our friend list feature has been really well regarded," Taylor said. "Not only friend lists where you can list your friends, but also smart lists that will make lists from people you go to school with, work with - we are trying to reach a broad audience."

Taylor also pointed to the news feed as a point of simplicity, stating that "the news feed is quite good at finding you the most engaging content. We spend a lot of time fine-tuning that."

Do you think the smart friend list and news feed features will keep Facebook's power users on the network? Tell us what you think in the comments.

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.

Just a Plus: The Smallest Modifier

Battelle, Brin and Gundotra talked about the transition from Google to "Google+," which, as Battelle wrote recently, indicates a shift of the whole brand, not just a new product.

"The strategy is revealed in the name," Gundotra agreed. "We chose the smallest modifier we could. Just a plus." But the shift it represents is not small. Plus is now a social layer built into all Google's Web products.

The social network itself has over 40 million users. "Are you happy with that?", Battelle asked. "We're surprised," Gundotra replied. "I don't think anyone on the team thought that, a month after open signups, we would hit that number."

By contrast, Facebook has some 800 million users. Obviously, it has been around for much longer. But as Sean Parker said on Monday, it's hard to overcome those network effects. Gundotra agreed that it's hard to beat the incumbent at its own game, but "we're playing a different game."

Is Google Plus "A Different Game?"

"I'm not a very social person," Brin said, but he insisted that Google Plus meets his needs. So it's a good network for anti-social people?

Brin thought Circles were too complicated at first, but he's changed his mind, even though he has "dozens of Circles." Gundotra added that Brin designed certain parts of the experience, like Hangouts. If Plus meets Brin's exacting specifications for social networking, he implied, it must be working.

But Battelle pointed out a commonplace problem reported by everyday users: "Nobody is on Google Plus that's in my world," other than social media/tech world people. How will they overcome the network effects of the established players?

Gundotra pointed to "that little icon in the top-righthand corner." Anyone who uses Google for anything will eventually be bugged into checking out Google Plus.

"Wouldn't it have been faster if you had just integrated Facebook Connect?" Battelle asked. Brin grimaced, and the audience laughed. "I'm serious!"

Gundotra, deadpan, replied, "There were some challenges with that approach."

Making A Nice Bouquet

Brin responded to criticisms that the many different Google products are not well integrated. While the company has traditionally been "letting a thousand flowers bloom," he said, now they need to put them into a nice bouquet. The integrations are coming in fits and starts. Plus users can collaborate on Docs in Hangouts, and YouTube users can browse videos from their Google Plus stream, but these aren't standard or across-the-board integrations. Gundotra said that Google Docs is "going to be" integrated into Plus, but no word on when.

Where's the Google Plus Platform?

Google was recently criticized at great length by an engineer for failing to build a thriving platform. Steve Yegge, ironically, meant to post the screed privately on Google Plus, but he shared it publicly by accident. The Google Plus API has trickled out read-only features, but it's far from a platform upon which developers can thrive. Battelle asked Gundotra and Brin to respond.

"I would be lying to you if I told you that that wasn't a bad day," Gundotra said. "Having said that, it gave the outside world a view of what we do internally." He spun the incident as a candid, transparent moment that gave the outside world "a peek" into Google culture. "That's why we didn't fire him," for what it's worth.

"I didn't make it past the first thousand pages myself," Brin quipped.

Gundotra then gave a pretty good answer as to why the API has been slow to arrive. "We're going to take a cautious approach. We don't want to make the mistakes of others" - referring to Twitter - who opened its APIs, encouraging developers to commit to projects, and then reversed some policies and alienated developers. "We have a reputation to uphold." Gundotra suggested that Google I/O in the spring will be the venue for more platform announcements.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

Take a politician for example: Discussions about Herman Cain varied depending on geography, too. In the midwest, more people were talking specifically about his 9-9-9 plan, whereas Floridians were listening to Bill O'Reilly and South Carolina was mostly paying attention to how Cain was leading in that state's polls. This data map shows some of the top headlines by state.

In another example, Mason looked at Bit.ly links from Tunisia over the past year, where a revolution occurred in January 2011. "The way people consume social media changes as their government changes," said Mason. "Human activity is reflected by something so simple as the number of people clicking links."

What Does This Mean for Privacy?

What you share is your identity, and what you read is your privacy. There's a space in-between, and that's what Mason is most interested in. Yesterday, 80 million links were fed into bit.ly, and 27% of those were from the U.S. She breaks it down by the top shared posts from yesterday, which include a Fast Company story about the great tech war of 2012, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle noses, a press release about free RIM stuff and a news article about the oldest marathon runner.

What do these all have in common? They make us go "wow," or satisfy our entitlement to free stuff from tech companies who we feel like have screwed us over. We share those stories with our fellow man, who we believe probably feel the same way. We receive more shares, likes and clicks, and we feel better.

The top most-clicked stories from yesterday look at lot different. They probe our inner thoughts - they are our private lives, the parts we don't share publicly. They are a story called "Know Your Neighbor: He's Racist," an animated boob GIF on Tumblr and a story about Hilary Duff revealing if her baby is a boy or a girl. Racism, oddly sexual imagery and ambiguous gender - is that what we're all really thinking about? According to bit.ly, the answer is yes.

"We need better tools to curate, search and analyze in order to consciously curate the things we keep private and the things we share," said Mason. But don't be fooled - bit.ly isn't trying to help you, per se - they are just trying to "build products that help people express themselves in the way they want to express themselves," said Mason.

We might want to appear like Superman, but we're really all a bunch of Clark Kents, right? What if we're a little bit of both? And if we are, why shouldn't our identity reflect that?

Images courtesy @hmason.

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.

1. Cities Will Have A Healthier Immune System

We're moving into cities at an unprecedented rate, and the immune system is at risk. Crowded cities are hotbeds of infectious diseases. Sensors will help health care providers, businesses, schools and governments prepare for health crises in advance.

2. City Buildings Will Sense And Respond Like Living Organisms

Buildings have lots of systems - heating, cooling, electricity, plumbing, et cetera - but they don't all work together. Better data could enable management of these systems in an integrated way, increasing efficiency, reducing waste and decreasing impact on the climate and environment.

3. Cars and City Buses Will Run On Empty

A smarter electric grid will be able to more efficiently manage power delivery to electric vehicles, but that's only part of the benefit. Vehicles generate electricity through kinetic energy that can be returned to the grid. IBM has partnered with the Danish EDISON Research Consortium to create a smarter grid to power transportation.

4. Smarter Systems Will Quench Cities' Thirst For Water And Save Energy

Barnes says big data can help manage the mounting global water crisis. He says that one in three city dwellers doesn't have access to clean water. IBM is working on a sewer system that can monitor the water for impurities and help governments mitigate risks.

5. Cities Will Be Able To Respond To Crises - Even Before Receiving An Emergency Call

Sensors will be able to detect little problems, like blocked sewer lines, and combine them with other data, like impending rain and nearby trucking routes, to alert officials to a crisis before it arises. IBM's vision of big data will create a platform for governments and first-responders to benefit from these data and connect the dots before there's already an emergency underway.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

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.

Monetizing The Long Tail

Independent publishers on WordPress represent the long tail of Web content. They publish on specific topics for niche audiences. That makes their individual reach small, in terms of raw traffic numbers, but their audiences are highly engaged with particular interests. They're valuable, but they're hard to reach at scale.

Federated Media recently acquired Lijit Networks to improve its targeting of ads to long-tail content. Lijit offers publishers an on-site search box that searches across multiple sites, including blogs, tweets, bookmarks and photos. Publishers can adjust the constraints to include outside content if they want, making Lijit searches a powerful way for visitors to explore topics in more depth. Lijit reports that over 70,000 publishers currently use their service.

In turn, the rich site data gathered by Lijit enables precise and relevant ad targeting, and it has served over 28.3 billion ads so far this year. Lijit's technology, Federated Media's scale and the WordPress.com audience represent a big chunk of high-quality, topically focused Web traffic that major advertisers like AOL, Yahoo! and Google have more trouble monetizing.

This partnership will offer small publishers a way to monetize, and it will give FMP the additional scale of reaching almost 300 million monthly unique visitors to WordPress.com sites.

The State of the Word is Strong

In August, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg gave his annual State of the Word address, in which he reported some strong numbers. Nearly 15% of the world's websites are powered by WordPress. For every 100 new active domains in the U.S., 22 of them run WordPress.

The open-source blogging platform also provides a thriving economy for developers. A survey of over 18,000 WordPress users and developers offers rich insight into the strength of the platform, and it's all available for anyone to peruse.

You can watch Mullenweg's 2011 address here:

WordPress users: would you opt in to this new ad partnership? Let us know in the comments.

Disclosure: Federated Media is ReadWriteWeb's advertising partner.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

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.

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half."
- John Wanamaker

Google took inspiration from Charles Joseph Minard's 1869 graph of Napoleon's campaign in Russia:

"It shows time, it shows motion, and it tells a story," Wojcicki said. "But I can't drill down. It's static. I can't make it dynamic." To make this kind of visualization useful for Google Analytics, it has to have adjustable filters. "What happened to the people who had horses? What happened to the people who spoke Russian?" Flow Visualization lets site owners drill down to Australian visitors or IE 7 users that way.

Google took inspiration from the 19th century chart and made it dynamic. The new Flow Visualization shows the march of users across a site, but it can be sorted to look at specific kinds of users. Web administrators can compare users on different browsers or systems, or from different referrers or countries, to see how their experiences differ on the site.

These new features provide a new way to use the goals administrators can set with Google Analytics. The Flow Visualization will show which users reached site goals and which ones didn't. Read more about these new ways of reporting analytics on the Google Analytics blog.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch day 3 live here.

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.

Here's the full schedule for day 3. You can watch the whole show here:

Follow Richard [@ricmacnz] and Jon [@JonMwords] on Twitter to catch their live updates from Web 2.0. The event's hashtag is #w2s. If you're at the conference, you can also contact Jon on iMessage using jon at readwriteweb dot com.

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.

Blurring The Digital Line

Partridge said that 16% of Visa's payments are processed online, and Schulman said American Express was at 8-10%. But both agreed that the digital and physical distinction is actually becoming less important over time. "Distinction between online and offline is blurring," Schulman said. The same information overlay is in front of us now whether we're in the physical store or not. The only difference is whether we can reach out and touch the product after we look at the details on our devices.

Partridge agreed. "There's a convergence," he said. "That convergence is going to continue to happen."

Primary Brands & Partner Brands

Battelle asked these representatives of the old guard credit card companies whether insurgents like Square and PayPal were stealing the spotlight from them. In the pre-Web era, the Visa and American Express brands themselves were associated directly with payments, but online, they're increasingly in the background while these newcomers get all the credit.

Partridge didn't seem to mind. He noted that 46% of online transactions are made with a Visa product, including PayPal, Visa's largest online merchant. Visa and PayPal compete in some ways, but they cooperate in others. That's just part of doing business in the digital economy. It didn't sound like Partridge was too upset about Visa sharing the spotlight with partners.

Schulman seemed more keen to compete. He felt that traditional associations with the American Express brand translate well to the Web, connoting trust, security and responsive customer service. He said that was an asset to Serve, the new American Express direct payment platform, which has begun to move into mobile and compete with a variety of new payment processors.

Redefining The Commerce Lifestyle

"The commerce lifestyle is being redefined," Schulman said. Partridge agreed, adding that this results in the leading companies sometimes offering similar solutions. "It's going to come down to who can execute," he said.

Schulman noted that it's hard for the established companies to adjust to disruption, but it's worth the effort. He said that digital offerings make it possible to serve younger customers who don't want credit or have thin credit. The Web creates opportunities that traditional products haven't been able to penetrate.

Data: The Holy Grail

Battelle noted that payment processors hold some of the most valuable user data out there. It's a massive asset, but it's also highly regulated. "Data is the holy grail of digital commerce," Schulman said, which explains the barrage of daily deals and other ploys to get consumers to share their consumer preferences - and thus their data - on the Web. But those services aren't precise enough. "Data and information has to be opt in," Schulman said. "It has to be held private."

Payment data is not just for tracking consumers. It has broader economic value. It helps detect fraud, it helps merchants plan stores and target products, and it also helps personalize experiences for consumers.

The major payment providers are not just services. They're platforms for the huge amount of data they produce. Both Schulman and Partridge were enthusiastic about opening APIs to developers beginning this year.

Schulman and Partridge want their trusted payment networks to support smart, precise applications of data to create broad value. Paraphrasing Schulman, we'll look back five years from now and laugh about the email barrages in online commerce. That was just the beginning.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

"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.

Identity Is Prismatic

"The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white," Poole said. "Who you are online is who you are offline." That rosy view of identity is complemented with a similarly oversimplified view of anonymity. People think of anonymity as dark and chaotic, Poole said.

But human identity doesn't work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic."

Choosing Our Own Identities

"We were on the right track at one point," Poole said. In the early days of the Web, its creators used their real names because they were the only people online. As the namespace got more crowded, people started using handles.

AOL Instant Messenger brought screen names to the mainstream. Poole said he agonized over his AOL handle, because he knew it would be a representation of him. That insight persists today at hacker conventions, where the real Web experts hang out. People there introduce themselves with their handles, because that's how they have chosen to identify.

"Twitter does the best job of this" of today's major social networks, Poole said. The platform itself uses handles and allows made-up answers in the real name field. Furthermore, "most of the apps allow multiple accounts. Facebook would never allow this, right?" He says Google Plus is the worst; you don't even get a vanity URL to distinguish yourself, and we all know how Google Plus handles pseudonyms: they delete the accounts.

Google & Facebook Are Eroding Our Options

Google and Facebook are "consolidating identity and making people seem more simple than they really are," Poole said. "Our options are being eroded."

Poole's bottom line is that there's a big market opportunity in this authentic, fluid kind of identity, which the big players are willfully abandoning. "You can incorporate identity without forcing your users to sacrifice something." Poole believes a Web network can validate an account using legitimate services without forcing the presentation of that user to be an over-simplification.

Creativity and self-expression are at stake, Poole says, and he's particularly concerned about young people. Facebook's new Timeline will lock people into their Facebook identities from birth.

Speaking at Facebook recently, Poole told its developers that they set the bar for identity, but he has since realized he was wrong: we, the users, do. "We're about to sacrifice something that's valuable, and it's special."

"I would ask us all to strive for this ideal when we design products, and as users on the Web, what we demand of services," Poole said. "Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want people to think about what the world would be like if we did it right."

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

Host John Battelle spoke with Parker about Napster, Spotify and the future of the music industry, what's wrong with Facebook, and they tiptoed around his mysterious new venture - Airtime - enough to insinuate that it's something like the Spotify of television.

The Next Music Industry

"Spotify is an attempt to finish what I started at Napster," Parker admitted. He said the main trouble with Napster was that they decided to go straight to peer-to-peer without talking to record labels. The peer-to-peer service invented a new and popular way to use the Internet, but the business wasn't world-changing. In fact, at worst, it facilitated something illegal.

Spotify came to the labels with a much more appealing proposition: unlimited free samples of music, frictionless sharing among friends, and a future industry free of the massive overhead of record manufacture and breakage, old-school promotion, and the bottlenecks of regional radio dominance.

There are key parts of the shared love of music that aren't yet available on Spotify. There's no bootlegs, outtakes, live shows, or any sorts of extras, not to mention unsigned artists who want frictionless sharing of their own material. This sort of music sharing is exactly what peer-to-peer networks are best at.

When asked by an audience member, Parker said he'd love to bring that to Spotify. The first step was to get labels on board, and the next step is to convince them that some peer-to-peer should be part of the service. Parker said the idea is to get labels to agree to an arrangement that "if it's not in our system, it's legal."

What's Wrong With Facebook

"What's wrong with Facebook?" Battelle asked Parker. "What don't you like?" He pointed out that Facebook is one of the Web services some people find creepy, feeling that it knows too much about them. "Should people not have this concern?"

Parker weaseled around a little bit, talking about being a Facebook shareholder preventing him from answering that question "satisfactorily." "There's good creepy, and then there's bad creepy," Parker said. "Today's 'creepy' is tomorrow's necessity." He was playing along.

Parker then got on to real answers, but he insisted that Facebook's biggest problem was "not privacy." He thinks it's about better list management.

"Facebook's biggest problem is just the glut of information that power users are overwhelmed with," Parker said. He wondered whether Facebook's problem is that key influencers have moved their efforts to Twitter and Google Plus. On Twitter, the expectations are simpler, and on Google Plus, they're easier to manage. Parker wants "better tools" to overcome that challenge.

The new Smart Lists and Subscribe Button are what Parker called "a step in the right direction." He pointed out that the root of the problem is that three simultaneous things happen when you friend someone on Facebook:

• You publicly assert your friendship
• You subscribe to your new friend's content
• You start broadcasting content to your new friend

Parker says these three things don't necessarily need to be part of one action. Once you've got your friend network organized into some sensible lists, the next step is selectively broadcasting to those lists.

Facebook does allow selective sharing, of course, but "it seems like a lot of work," as Battelle said in response to Parker's answer.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

Today marks the beginning of the annual Web 2.0 Summit at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This year's theme is The Data Frame. "We live in a world clothed in data," the introduction says, "and as we interact with it, we create more - data is not only the Web's core resource, it is at once both renewable and boundless." That's what Web 2.0 attendees will be talking about in the halls of the Palace Hotel. ReadWriteWeb is on the scene to loop you into this conversation. Here's what to expect:

The Data Frame: Who's Here & What's Happening?

The common theme at Web 2.0 this year is how the key players are leveraging the vast amounts of data on the Web. "Everybody's talking about how to leverage data and turn it into actionable information," organizer John Battelle told InformationWeek. Here's the summit's big vision statement:

"At the 2011 edition of Web 2.0 Summit, we'll use data as a framing device to understand the state of the Web. We know that those who best leverage data will win. So who's winning, and how? Who's behind? In each of our key points of control such as location, mobile platforms, gaming, content, social - who is innovating, and where are the opportunities? What new classes of services and platforms are emerging, and what difficult policy questions loom? And what of the consumer - will users become their own "point of control," and start to understand the power of their own data?"

We'll be here to report out on our conversations, and fortunately lots of the big events at the summit will be streamed live.

You can watch the whole show right here:

Check out the live stream schedule to see which events you can watch. We'd love to hear your reactions to any of these events. Share them in comments on the site or by mentioning Richard or me on Google Plus.

Here are the highlights I'm most excited about, which means I'm likely to blog about them:

Monday
I can't wait to hear from Tony Conrad, whose current venture at About.me was acquired by AOL. About.me is a free service to make a personal splash page aggregating all your various Internet presences. It's pretty Web 2.5, if you ask me. His Pivot session is from 3:40 to 3:45.

Right after that, there are High Order Bit sessions with Sean Parker and Christopher Poole - A.K.A. moot, founder of 4chan - who are both sure to be sensational.

Tonight at the dinner, we'll hear from Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter. That won't be streamed live, but we'll be sure to report back.

Tuesday
Anyone interested in commerce or gaming will have lots to watch on Tuesday (see schedule for details).

Personally, I'm looking forward to hearing from Dennis Crowley of foursquare. Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, and Jane McGonical, author of Reality Is Broken, are sure to have an interesting chat about gaming.

Tim Westergren, founder and chief strategy officer at Pandora will talk to Adam Lashinsky of Fortune Magazine. And I'm very curious to hear Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speak at the end of the day.

Wednesday
The last day has a jam-packed schedule. Here's who I'm going to at least try to see:

Mike McCue of Flipboard, Susan Wojcicki from Google will be my morning, and I'll be speaking to Rod Smith (now program director David Barnes) from IBM about emerging Internet technologies. At RWW, we're big fans of bit.ly's Hilary Mason, who also speaks Wednesday.

MC Hammer himself goes on at 11:25. Don't miss that.

The biggest session for me, though, will be Vic Gundotra and John Battelle at 2:00. Gundotra is Google's SVP of engineering, and he's one of the key people behind Google Plus.

To see what else is happening at the summit, check out the full event schedule.

Want to get a sense of what Web 2.0 is like? Here's a great video from last year of Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley) talking about Internet trends:

Web 2.0: Seven Years Since An Update

The term "Web 2.0" was coined in 2004 at the inaugural conference of the same name. It was meant to connote life after the Dot Com collapse. In 2005, Tim O'Reilly published "What is Web 2.0," a seminal document about the technologies and trends that would shape what happened next. But no one can predict the future. While the broad strokes still feel right, there are examples of Web 2.0 in O'Reilly's paper that don't work anymore, and there are new platforms he couldn't have anticipated.

If Napster is Web Music 2.0, what's iTunes Match? SEO might be Web 2.0, but Google Panda is already in version 2.5. Overall, O'Reilly made a pretty good list, but important parts of the "Web as a Platform" have already evolved beyond what Web 2.0 anticipated.

We have adjusted our understanding of Web 2.0 over the years, and the conference this week will be full of discussions of how the notion has grown and changed, and maybe whether it's time to release a new version.

What about the term Web 2.0 itself? Is it still useful to us seven years on? Enter our contest and tell us what the term Web 2.0 means to you.

Follow Richard [@ricmacnz] and Jon [@JonMwords] on Twitter to catch their live updates from Web 2.0. The event's hashtag is #w2s. If you're at the conference, you can also contact Jon on iMessage using jon at readwriteweb dot com.

It's now 7 years after the term Web 2.0 was coined and, in association with HP LaserJet, we're running a contest to survey what (if anything) it means to you nowadays. Simply leave a comment here on ReadWriteWeb and the winner receives a $500 home office upgrade.

Contest Rules

You can read the full rules of the contest on this webpage, but here a few of the main points:

1) You must be a U.S. resident and at least 18 years of age to enter.

2) The Contest begins on October 10, 2011 at 12:00 p.m. ET and ends on October 21, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

3) To enter, simply leave a comment on ReadWriteWeb in the discussions area below. Be sure to enter your email address. The submission must be at least 25 words and no longer than 300 words.

To get your creative juices going, here is a brief history of Web 2.0 along with my own thoughts on its relevancy today.

A Brief History of Web 2.0

The term began as a moniker for a conference and grew into something much larger. Even as early as the first conference, in October 2004, the term was starting to assume a deeper meaning. I interviewed Tim O'Reilly in November 2004 and we had a long and fruitful discussion about the early themes in Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is still a moniker for a conference brand, only now it's two separate events: Web 2.0 Summit and Web 2.0 Expo. So as a conference brand at least, it's still very relevant.

As a description of a larger trend, Web 2.0 has evolved over the years. In September 2005, Tim O'Reilly published the definitive article defining Web 2.0. The core principle is that Web 2.0 is "The Web as Platform." The rest of the definition is expansive and difficult to summarize in a sentence or two. The following meme map attempted to bring it all together in one visual bite:

In October 2009, Web 2.0 got a refresh with the help of a new term: Web Squared. Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle co-authored an article, which explained that Web 2.0 was (in 2009) "being applied in areas we only imagined in 2004." Areas like smartphones, new "collective intelligence applications" like Twitter, and sensors. Web 2.0 was also being applied to real-world problems, such as health care.

The latest evolution is a Web 2.0 Map, which the organizers of the Web 2.0 Summit have developed over the past two years.

So, with all that said, what does Web 2.0 mean to me today?

The term "Web 2.0" is first and foremost the brand name of a tech conference. That's how the term was born and that's what still drives it. But regardless of its commercial usage, fundamentally I think we are still in the same era of the Web. Something important changed around 2003-2004, both in terms of a tech market re-birth and in the types of technology that were beginning to become popular.

I have always used the term "read/write Web" to signify what I believe was the essential change back in 03/04: the Web matured as a two-way system, enabling more and more people to 'write' to the Web as well as 'read' it. Tools like blogs and wikis, services like YouTube and Flickr, popular websites like Wikipedia and Amazon.com.

By 03/04, the Web had evolved from a broadcasting medium to a fully interactive one. That overarching trend has continued to evolve to this day. Today the Web is more social, more real-time, more mobile - among many other wonderful twists and turns.

That's what Web 2.0 means to me today, now let us know what it means to you. A $500 home office upgrade will be awarded to the person whose answer shows the most insight and creativity (as judged by a panel of qualified judges). Be in to win by leaving your comment below.

Update: Congratulations to Brittany Smith, from Portland, who wrote the winning comment and receives a $500 gift voucher. Thanks everyone who entered.

Security researchers at Symantec recently uncovered a backdoor trojan whose spread is being dictated by commands hosted in Google Groups, Google's online discussion forums. The backdoor trojan, named Trojan.Grups, appears to be the first ever malware to use an online newsgroup as the "command and control" center for botnet communications. It's certainly the first time that Google Groups specifically has been compromised in this way. This new discovery points to what appears to be the latest trend in what you could call "Web 2.0 malware," that is, nasty computer programs that don't just spread in social networks, but actually use the infrastructure of the social networks themselves to do the spreading.

Botnets are groups of computers compromised by malware programs, often called "zombie computers," which are controlled by "bot herders," the person or persons responsible for remotely controlling the infected PCs, unbeknownst to the PCs' owners. Traditionally, a centralized server of some sort would issue the commands that instruct the computers what action to perform. In many cases, the zombie machines are used to send out spam, to perform click fraud, to aid in identity theft, or are directed to attack another web server on the internet, as was recently seen with the Twitter/Facebook/LiveJournal attacks of last month.

With this particular new trojan, the command-and-control center for issuing the botnet commands is not a single server on the internet. It's Google Groups itself. Using a private newsgroup, the trojan executes a command which logs it into the newsgroup and requests a specific page. The page contains the encrypted commands the malware is to carry out. The responses from the compromised machines are then sent back to Google Groups and are uploaded as posts to the newsgroup.

According to security company Symnatec's analysis of this new trojan, it appears that it is a prototype implementation meant to test the feasibility of using newsgroups in this way. The trojan is attempting to remain discreet and undetected, being used to subtly gather information and potentially determine its future attack targets. The researchers think that the trojan may have been developed for targeted corporate espionage where anonymity and discretion are priorities.

Using Web 2.0 as the C&C for Botnets

This latest trojan isn't the first to use a social network to aid in its spread. What is unusual about it, though, is that it actually uses the social network that is Google Groups to host the commands which control the malware's actions. This is a different sort of scenario than your typical social networking-based malware which simply uses popular online networks as the vector for the attack. This is using the network as the brains.

Another recent example of this sort of Web 2.0-controlled malware involves the recent discovery of a botnet which used Twitter.com to issue commands. In an arguably ingenious move, Brazilian identity thieves created a Twitter account for the sole purpose of sending out commands to its associated malware. Each command was posted as a status update to the Twitter account. As researchers noted at the time, this sort of setup could have used any number of web sites or services on the internet to do the same - all that was needed was an RSS feed. In fact, the same malware was later seen on both Jaiku.com, a Twitter-like service acquired by Google in 2007, and Tumblr, a simple blogging platform.

Given the open, "anyone-can-post" nature of Web 2.0 and social networking services, the online communities that have become the de facto standard on today's web, it was only a matter of time before that openness was compromised by hackers wishing to use the services for more nefarious purposes than just "sharing with your friends."

For now, there are still relatively few incidents where a botnet has been discovered as using a Web 2.0 service as the command-and-control center for operations. However, the idea must surely appeal to botnet operators as hiding these sorts of messages in the larger social networking infrastructures that house valid communications makes the botnets harder to identify and shut down. You can't simply blacklist the IP or URL once discovered - you have to rely on the social networking vendor to remove the malicious accounts. If any of these recent efforts at web 2.0-controlled malware are successful (and the Google Groups trojan has been - it's been around since November 2008!), then it's likely we'll begin to see even more programs like this in the future.

'Web 3.0,' however, seems to have peaked as a term to describe the next wave of Internet innovation before it even had a chance to happen.

For a the full list of Web 2.0 buzzwords, head over to the Royal Pingdom blog.

Conclusions?

We wouldn't want to draw too many conclusions from this list, as it is based on search terms, and as users get more familiar with these and start bookmarking their favorite sites, they will probably start using search less. Also, as these terms become household names, fewer users will look them up on Google.

In some ways then, we might be able to interpret the decline of searches for 'RSS' or 'cloud computing' as a positive thing, as users have replaced searches for these general terms with more specific queries.