The Web 2.0 orgy known as Web 2.0 Expo being finally over, Josh and I thought it'd be good to pick out the most interesting new products and services on display here.
You'll find two of our picks fairly obvious (watch the video to see them), but I bet a lot of people will be confused by our third pick, AirSet. This is a virtualization product. It's a complete cloud PC that you can pour calendar info, Web sites, wikis, blogs, etc., into. Who needs it? That's a good question, and the company's pitch, which claims that nearly everyone is aching for their own virtual PC in the cloud, really misses the mark. But the concept here is important, and AirSet is one of the first companies to try to deliver this type of service for non-geeks. The team still has a ton of work to do before this service has a chance at getting traction, but it's worth watching.
Best swag from the show was at the Instructables booth. Watch to see why.
O'Reilly Media's Tim O'Reilly said he had his phone on the wrong Twitter setting to receive audience Twitter questions during his Web 2.0 Expo keynote interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
(Credit: Twitter)Update: This story now reflects Tim O'Reilly's mea culpa for not asking audience questions sent in via Twitter.
SAN FRANCISCO--After all the hooplah over interactivity--or lack thereof--during keynote speeches at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March, I've been thinking a lot about how conferences can incorporate the backchannel.
That's why I was pleasantly surprised to see Tim O'Reilly, who runs O'Reilly Media, which is the co-organizer of the Web 2.0 Expo here, invite the audience for his keynote conversation with Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz to Twitter him questions to ask Schwartz.
He pointed out that the dynamic of the room didn't allow for audience members to stand at microphones to ask questions, so instead, he said, people could send him questions via his Twitter account (@timoreilly), which he would then be able to check on his mobile phone.
This can be a nice way to bring in the audience and it can showcase the ways that audience members can now interact with the people onstage at conferences and symposiums.
As I wrote in my earlier story, it is becoming increasingly clear that audiences want to be able to have a say in what is being discussed onstage, and technologies like Twitter, Meebo, instant message, and others make it more likely that not only will those in the audience be able to talk silently among themselves, but also to communicate with the speakers.
O'Reilly Media's Tim O'Reilly encouraged the audience at his keynote interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz to Twitter him questions, but didn't follow up by asking any of them.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)But, sadly, O'Reilly never actually checked his phone to see if there were any Twittered questions from the audience--either those in the room or those following from outside--and therefore wasted this golden opportunity to bring the backchannel into the conversation.
There's nothing wrong, per se, with not incorporating the backchannel in such a keynote address, of course. At Web 2.0 Expo, the keynote addresses are shorter than at many conferences, and so I can easily see why keeping the discussion solely between those onstage makes perfect sense. And in fairness to him, there were really only a few minutes left in the time for the talk when he posed the opportunity.
But it still felt like a little bit of a slap in the face for O'Reilly to offer the audience the ability to Twitter questions and then not follow through.
Afterwards, I Twittered O'Reilly to ask him why he hadn't asked any of the questions I'm sure he must have gotten. He hasn't responded yet. But if I hear from him, I'll update this blog.
At just before 3 pm pacific Friday, O'Reilly Twittered publicly that he had accidentally had his cell phone set to the wrong Twitter setting and that it was only showing replies from Twitter users he was actively following.
It's good of him to address the issue and explain why he didn't follow through on his offer to the audience.
SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz rightly gets credit for pioneering the corporate blog as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others. But pretty soon the novelty of his methods will wear off, he predicted.
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz speaks at the Web 2.0 Expo
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)"At some point the word 'blogging' will be anachronistic," Schwartz said at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. "I communicate."
And he predicted, in effect, that the rest of the executive world will catch up. "Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it," he said in an on-stage interview with O'Reily Media chief Tim O'Reilly. "You got the message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came round and gave you a way to reach the entire planet."
In Sun's effort to recover some of the glory and profitability it had in the first Internet bubble, the company has embraced open-source software, adopted servers based on Intel and AMD's x86 processors, and switched CEOs.
One thing hasn't changed, though, from the Scott McNealy era to the Schwartz era: the company tries to be provocative. It's cheaper than advertising, and blogs are just a new way to accomplish the goal.
"If you say undifferentiated things that are expected, then you shouldn't expect anyone to care," Schwartz said, asked about what he meant when he said, "Controversy was...not a byproduct of the strategy--it was the strategy," on his blog earlier this month when discussing his company's open-source processor strategy.
Blogs and open-source software are complementary, Schwartz added.
"Sun makes money by selling the innovations in data centers," but that's a hard market to reach, he said. "Free software and free ideas are the best way to reach the marketplace."
We're wrapping up the last day of the Web 2.0 Expo, on a live stream at about 10:00 a.m. today and at 2:00 p.m. Tune in...
Video is hosted by a Webware media partner, the Blogtropol.us Bloggers' Lounge.
BigString just released "Self Destructing Instant Messaging," a plug-in for AIM that lets you convert an ordinary IM discussion into one where the messages literally vanish from the screen moments after they are sent.
To initiate a self-destructing thread, you have to start from AOL's IM client and install the BigString software add-on. Then, from within AIM, you get an option to "Go BigString," which if the company were not so enamored of its branding, would say instead something useful, like "launch secret IM window." At any rate, once you select this option, a browser window pops up on your computer, and the person at the other end of your chat is sent a URL to pop up a similar window. The two of you then have your IM talk in this browser-based chat. In the window, the messages vanish from the screen after a predetermined period of time (default is 10 seconds), and they cannot be copied from the screen nor even screen-grabbed before they go.
It works. I couldn't get my own screen grab. This one, which shows the first two lines of an IM chat evaporating, came from BigString's own site.
(Credit: BigString)You can, of course, take a picture of the screen to record your chats, or just write things down. But there's no on-computer way to actually record a BigString IM conversation.
Oddly, the URL the product uses for its disappearing Web chats is not secure (https:), so I am not sure that chat contents cannot be intercepted en route. But at least you'll know that no records of your IM are being kept on your PC.
The tool is useful for terrorists, thieves, and child predators, not to mention teenagers, job-seekers doing their seeking from the office, paranoid government types, anyone in financial services or health care, and possibly reporters' sources--just to make their jobs a little more difficult.
Despite the serious privacy the product adds to IM, the interface is overly cutesy. I would like to see an option for a more graphically-straightforward version of the evaporating e-mail.
The company is working on a Meebo-like Web-based client that will support several IM networks, but for now, as I said, you need to use the AIM client to initiate a secure chat with the product.
The service is free, and will be supported, presumably, by disappearing ads.
Netvibes, a developer of customizable start pages, plans to make its widget platform, application programming interfaces, and iPhone version open source, according to CEO Tariq Krim.
"We want to compete with Google widgets," Krim said. "Our container supports Google widgets and every other platform. If we release our code, people will leverage it and grow the reach of our platform."
Krim hopes that supporting a broad range of platforms, including Windows Vista and Windows Live, Mac OS X, Opera, Yahoo, and Google, will inspire the developer community to adopt and innovate on the Netvibes platform.
Netvibes will make money with sponsored widgets, Netvibe Universes, and business services. Opening up the code to developers will enable them to compete on more equal footing with Netvibes as well.
During a post-keynote luncheon with a few reporters, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh and Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS) chief architect Neal Sample shared more details about the inside-out rewiring of the Web giant.
Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh expects version 1.0 of Y!Open to be available this year.
(Credit: Dan Farber)Balogh said that co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang is taking a personal interest in the project, which began in earnest as part of Yang's 100-day plan, which he created when he took the helm of the company from Terry Semel in September of last year. He noted that Y!OS was started before Microsoft came knocking on Yahoo's door. Balogh joined Yahoo from VeriSign just prior to Microsoft's February 1, 2008 takeover bid.
Y!OS is expected to have a material impact on Yahoo's page growth and time spent on the site, as well as revenue. It was baked into the calculations projecting a doubling of its operating cash flow from $1.9 billion to $3.7 in the three-year span.
Version 1.0 of what is being called Y!Open will be released at some unspecified time later this year, and will include a development environment for several properties, a social "activator" and graph engine, an events engine, and a single profile for users, Balogh said.
The activator engine handles the combining of different relationship groupings, such as the Yahoo Mail e-mail address book, Yahoo Messenger contacts, Flickr friends, Yahoo 360, and Yahoo Mash, Sample said. Yahoo will be careful to protect user privacy and won't apply the information without user consent, he added.
"We have to replumb Yahoo to use a single profile and create feeds, a way to consume feeds and Web services APIs and to layer those mechanisms into the platform," Balogh said.
Yahoo is part of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google and MySpace, and will be using the specification as part of the Yahoo application framework (see the slide below). OpenSocial allows applications to work across the major social networks, except Facebook at this point, without modification.
Yahoo's new architecture, called Yahoo Open Strategy proves that the Internet is made of tubes.
(Credit: Yahoo)Initially, Yahoo will be vetting applications that touch Yahoo Mail. "We don't want to risk exposing user data," Sample said. "Once they prove themselves we can open up more. We are starting with a toe in the water."
SearchMonkey is the first fruit of Yahoo's new open initiative. It allows developers to alter the presentation of search results, is currently in limited beta and will be in general release within the next several weeks, Balogh said.
Compared to creating a social graph and scaling the back end for 500 million users and 10 billion latent relationships among the Yahoo clan, SearchMonkey is relatively simple feat of openness.
Yahoo has an ambitious and complex task ahead to deliver version 1.0 within this year amidst other distractions, such as Microsoft's courtship of the company. Balogh talks a good game: "The goal is nothing short of creating the best developer environment for creating Internet applications across the Web." Now Yahoo has to show that it can execute.
Flickr's The Commons project is an example of how the site's users can bring useful context to information from a single source, in this case the Library of Congress.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)SAN FRANCISCO--In return for the huge amount of work Flickr users do to tag photos on the popular photo-sharing site, they should get the benefit of the algorithms the service uses to bring meaning to the data.
That's how at least some at Flickr feel, according to Kakul Srivastava, the service's director of product management said in her talk, "The next generation of tagging: Searching and discovering a better user experience," at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday.
The idea behind that theory is that as Flickr users proactively add tags to countless millions of photos stored on the site, the service is able to draw some very specific conclusions about the behavior of those users and the things that are happening around them.
This graph shows how, over time, Flickr users have continued to add a tremendous number of tags to the photos on the service, a rate that continues to grow.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)And no wonder: The sheer amount of tags users have added over the four years the service has been operating is breathtaking: according to Srivastava, if you took the average text size of all the tags added to Flickr photos and laid them out, it would line the floors of 14 Wal-Marts.
"It's an incredible amount of content to parse, to reveal, and to take the meaning of," Srivastava said.
Unfortunately, I would have to say that the talk didn't deliver on its title: Srivastava didn't share anything particularly new with the audience, discussing mainly things that were probably already well-understood by most in the room.
Still, it was an interesting presentation, particularly because Srivastava talked about some of the ways that Flickr has evolved over the years, and what it's possible to learn based on how it's grown.
One of the most notable changes has been what she termed the increasing sophistication in the way Flickr users tag photos.
At first, she suggested, people were mainly tagging photos to add context about themselves. Then, gradually, they added context about other people, and then found ways to express shared experiences through their tags.
The best example of that--though more complex than what most people get involved in--is Flickr's The Commons project.
Within the first hour after the Library of Congress photos went up, Flickr users had added 150 tags to them. Within 24 hours, users added 11,000 tags.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)This is a project that launched in January with the U.S. Library of Congress as a pilot partner. The idea was that the Library of Congress provided a large collection of archival photos for the Flickr community to add tags to for additional context.
The reach of the Flickr community was immediately obvious, she suggested. The project launched with no tags, and within an hour, users had added 150 tags. Within three hours, the number was 767 and by the end of 24 hours, fully 11,000 tags.
Beyond that, Flickr users were able to add all kinds of contextual comments to the photos. Srivastava pointed to one such photo, a picture of a stream of dock workers leaving work at the end of the day, which had several user comments appended to it.
One of them was quite striking. The user noticed that all the African Americans in the photo were on one side of the stream, while the whites were on the other.
"Looks like 'quittin' time' was a segregated as the rest of life," the user commented.
Where the Flickr user community's participation in The Commons project is useful is in bringing personal context to images that previously had none.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)For Srivastava, that kind of comment is deeply important because it adds significant cultural meaning to a photo that otherwise was just another in a large collection.
Another notable emergent behavior on Flickr, she said, is the ability to determine when some sort of newsworthy event is going on, simply because of the use of a tag.
For example, she pointed out that traditionally, "Popemobile" wasn't a very common tag. But all of a sudden, she said, it was being used by a lot of people in the Washington, D.C., area, and by virtue of that, it was possible to see that something was going on around the Pope's recent visit to the United States.
In the end, Srivastava's talk didn't break new ground, but it did illustrate the ways that Flickr sees its users explaining the world around them through the use of tags. The concept itself may not be news, but tying it together and thinking about the many ways tagging on a site as popular as Flickr adds meaning is a worthy exercise.
In Web 2.0 conference culture, a wheelchair becomes an ad platform, and the letter "X" serves as a mascot. So why not celebrate SWAG?
Inside the wagon, Marjorie Kase plays with a stuffed monkey, one of the cuter pieces of Web 2.0 Expo SWAG.
(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)A group of Los Angeles friends who work in social media were kvetching earlier this month about the mountain of waste--such as branded T-shirts, stress balls, key chains, and other giveaways--that pile up at tech conferences.
They decided to turn that into an opportunity to sweeten the convention party circuit while benefiting charity.
Michael Liskin, Marjorie Kase, and David Preciado decided to cruise the Web 2.0 Expo in a "Schwaggin' Wagon," collecting excess knickknacks from vendors. They plan to send the souvenirs in care packages to U.S. troops in Iraq, as well as to the nonprofit InnerKids.
The plan came together 10 days ago. Naturally, a blog, a Facebook group, and accounts on Twitter and BrightKite (more here) shortly followed.
Eight sponsors, including Mashable, Dogster, and Girl Gamer, cover the rental and fuel. In exchange, their logos plaster the 15-person, Chevy rental van that the friends drove to San Francisco for this week's expo.
"It shows that once you get something going and it resonates with people, it can go far," said Liskin. "Even if we don't gather voluminous amounts of SWAG this time, we're raising awareness about the waste."
Last night I hitched rides to party hop in the wagon crammed with SWAG, colorful pinwheel lights, paper lanterns, and tipsy conference goers. All it's missing is a disco ball.
But at the Web 2.0 Expo, there seems to be a shortage of the primo SWAG, unlike the iPhone given to each attendee of Office 2.0 last year. So if all you got out of this conference was a lousy t-shirt, the Schwaggin' Wagon crew invites you to track them down via Twitter or BrightKite.
"If someone brings two or more pieces of SWAG, we could do a SWAG exchange," Liskin said. "In the tradition of user-generated content, it's a collaborative process. People can tweet us and tell us where to go."
He and the fellow "Schwaggineers" total six people, including Kyra Reed, Daniel Hartman, and my friend Andy Sternberg. They want to make the rounds of more tech conferences, but haven't decided on the next stop.
Aiming to reduce the project's carbon footprint, however, Liskin is pledging to use a natural gas or other "green" vehicle next time.
Can't find a taxi? Want to offload a stress ball?
(Credit: Andy Sternberg)
As I've said previously, the Web 2.0 Expo show features a lot of products for developers. But there are still cool new Web apps to find--especially at the Launch Pad, a rapid-fire demo session featuring six relatively new companies. It's kind of like a mini-Demo.
Acquia sells a commercialized version of Drupal, the open-source content management (and Webware 100 winner). If you buy the open-to-commercial model, as executed by RedHat (Linux), and Trixbox (Asterisk), this business makes a lot of sense. I'm glad to see the platform get some business attention.
Chirpscreen is a fun little app that shows you what your friends are up to on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. It also tracks eBay keywords for you. You can get your updates in a desktop window or on your screensaver. It's like a more graphical version of Friendfeed, and like Friendfeed (and other Twitter clients), you can also reply back to posts you see in the tool. It feels like a shallow app, but that's just because it's pretty. News today: Mac version now available.
Smart question from the venture capitalist panel on Chirp: how do you make money? Answer: ads, affiliate feeds, and bundled downloads. All proven models, but none really light my fire.
JobScore. This is a clever recruiting service. Not only can you outsource your company's jobs page to this company, but it will track applications to your jobs. And in a neat twist, it lets you make money from the applicants you don't hire. See previous coverage: Jobscore pays you for recruiting rejects. Update: launching some of the features now, as well as free credits now if you sign up.
Oortle is announcing Videophlow, a social app that lets you view YouTube videos in lockstep with other people, chat about them, and perform important tasks like throw virtual tomatoes at the screen. See today's coverage: Videophlow tries to enliven YouTube.
Tradevibes is a place to discover new start-up companies. Most of the companies on the service are, not surprisingly, Web start-ups. Seems to be oriented more towards industry experts and entrepreneurs than users, but has a nice community vibe. You can also embed Tradevibes database widgets on your own site. I'm going to spend more time looking at this one. News today: a "top movers" list that shows what the community likes best.
Triggit is a very odd blogger's helper, focused on adding monetization (affiliate links, mostly) to posts. It can also automatically add related videos from YouTube and Flickr. See previous review: Triggit: Weird but handy blogging tool. The news today is a handy new way to drag Google Adsense ads into a page. Pretty handy tool if Adsense is part of your monetization scheme.
Via SMS voting, the audience picked Triggit as its favorite. My favorites: Acquia and Jobscore. They have real business models.
