DMEC Crashes Web 2.0 Expo
A few of us checked out the Web 2.0 Expo 
Captivated by Tim O’Reillyin San Francisco today. During the opening address, Tim O’Reilly once again took credit for coining the term Web 2.0, acknowledged (under his breath) that there may be a bit of a bubble going on now, then claimed we were still in the defining stages of “something huge.” He remarked that web 2.0 is largely about building the global computer network by harnessing the collective intelligence of all the people that are connected–basically an articulate phrasing of crowdsourcing, UGC, etc.
O’Reilly then weakly transitioned to the opening keynote speaker, Jeff Bezos. Bezos was essentially a shill for Amazon Web Services, which was interesting to a point, but it would have been nice to hear his broader vision of web 2.0. He announced that 
We had great seats there are over 5 billion objects stored in S3, and that a peak day sees 920,847,345 requests to the service–wow, these are big numbers, and previously unreleased to the public. Bezos acknowledged they are not making money today on AWS, but that it was an investment and they certainly plan to make money in the future. O’Reilly then spent the next 20 minutes in a pseudo-conversation/interview/faceoff that degenerated into an awkward attempt at speculating what Amazon might be up to in the future, with Bezos not giving him anything.
So what does Web 2.0 mean to me? I distill it down to useful interactive functionality on the internet. For me that means anything from posting a video of my daughter on our family blog to adding a show to my Tivo queue with Yahoo TV. For a business, it might mean hosting files or using compute power through AWS, or using business applications from Salesforce.com. What does it mean to you?
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
StumbleUpon
email
2 Comments
In between classes, I also snuck out to the Web Nouveau Expo for an hour. My main reason for attending today was to hear what Jay Adelson, Joe Kraus, and Mena Trott had to say. John Battelle had more success getting them to talk than Mr. O’Reilly had with Mr. Bezos. After filling out my taxes tonight, I was thinking about something Joe Kraus said today (and has said before). He expressed regret about putting JotSpot, the product, in beta without putting the business model in beta along with the product. I wonder if he would extend that advice to advertising-supported business models? How do you incorporate advertising into a product before you have the eyeballs to attract advertisers? (Don’t tell me Google AdSense…) It seems like most ad-supported consumer internet plays start by attracting users and selling ads once the inventory exists.
I was super-impressed with Buzzword and gTimer (two of the apps used in the demo of Adobe Apollo).
[...] Web 2.0 Expo A few of us went to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and also got chance to sit in the keynote by Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos talked too much about Amazon web service, not much about web 2.0, which was a bit disappointing. Tony wrote a nice blog about it on the DMEC blog so check it out. [...]