web20conf

After three days, the Web 2.0 Conference has wound down. CNET News.com reporters covered the show in depth. These are the latest stories from the Web 2.0 frontier:

Search executive Marissa Mayer says instant video posting made YouTube a winner.

Combining a browser plug-in with hosted Web services, Photosyth creates a 3D navigation through stitched-together photos. Images: Microsoft's 3D photo album

Live chat for Yahoo Mail users in a couple months will be as easy as opening an … Read more

If a panel of regular people at an Internet event is to be believed, teens really do spend hours a day on MySpace and YouTube, and Microsoft needs to advertise its search more.

In what was probably the most interesting session at the Web 2.0 Summit here, Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy brought nine people, including teens, college students and mothers, onto the stage on Thursday and asked questions about their Internet usage.

Not surprisingly, the teens reported that their favorite activities online are social networking, watching viral videos and sending instant messages.

One teenager said he and his … Read more

From the Web 2.0 Conference (a bit late, sorry about that):

The blog search service Sphere is adding a feature called Sphere It. This is a widget that Web publishers (bloggers and "traditional" Web content sites, too) can put on their sites to automatically find blog posts related to their stories. It's easier to show than to explain. Click this:

Sphere also has a bookmarklet version of Sphere It that you can use on any site you visit.

Robert Scoble is not impressed, saying it doesn't find relevant articles. I've seen mixed … Read more

I've been agitating with e-mail vendors for years to integrate instant messaging. After all, why should e-mail and IM be two completely different applications, on two different networks, with two different address books? Both applications are forms of person-to-person text communication. They belong together.

It took a few years of kvetching and waiting, but the major online e-mail providers have started to integrate the two experiences. Google lets you kick off a chat from its Gmail interface, for example. But that's nothing like what Yahoo is showing off today at the Web 2.0 Conference: The first real … Read more

Demo fatigue set in early yesterday here at Webware HQ. After watching 13 five-minute demos back-to-back in the Launchpad session at the Web 2.0 Conference (or Summit, depending) with no break except for a brief stretch when one presenter's machine needed to reboot, it became hard to focus. But we've condensed the best and worst of the Launchpad session into a five-minute video. Plus: An exclusive peek inside the Web 2.0 Conference schwag bag!

In addition to our Web 2.0 Conference blog posts, News.com has a full rundown of news from the show, with … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Adobe is seeking to balance openness with commercial interests as it tries to "push the envelope" of what's possible on the Web, said company CEO Bruce Chizen on Wednesday.

Chizen spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit here where he defended the company's decision to acquire Macromedia last year, the company best known for its Flash Player and Web authoring software.

Images on the Web are routinely created with Adobe's Photoshop or Illustrator and documents are presented with its Acrobat Reader. But that wasn't enough for Chizen, one of the chief architects behind … Read more

MySpace, the wildly popular social network, is considering letting its millions of members transport their profile data to other sites or social networks by introducing so-called APIs, or application protocol interfaces, according to Ross Levinsohn, president of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive, owner of the site.

"It's a great idea. It's something we've been looking at and considering," Levinsohn said Wednesday during the Web 2.0 Summit, in response to a question from an audience member .

Such a move would come on the heels of MySpace rival Facebook opening a developers' site so that people … Read more

Don't accuse Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle of elitism.

In organizing the Web 2.0 Summit (previously known as Web 2.0 Conference), they created an event showcasing technologies inherently associated with open access and empowered community. But they made it an invite-only event, limiting the number of attendees and press to keep it "intimate," as one insider explained on Tuesday, the opening day of the three-day San Francisco event. The organizers are obviously hip to the economics of scarcity under which making it hard to get in only increases the allure.

The event, put on … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is convinced that the company's nascent hosted computing service will yield dividends for the retail giant in time.

Bezos spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit on Wednesday where the publisher and conference host queried him on Amazon's Web Services business.

Financial analysts have voiced some concern about the level of technology spending that Amazon is doing and whether its foray into hosted computing services is a distraction from its online commerce business.

Bezos was unapologetic about investing in Amazon Web Services--a collection of 10 hosted services which give software developers … Read more