Blog Bites Man

I’m finding it painfully difficult to write an interesting blog about the Web 2.0 Expo that took place last week in SF. That’s because the show — at least from my vantage point on the expo floor — was painfully plain. Where were the coolest, latest, greatest Web 2.0 technologies? The Twitters, Facebooks, YouTubes? While I’m sure they were being used on people’s laptops and iPhones, they were otherwise invisible on the expo floor. Vassil Mladjov gets it right” “There was not clear innovation that I can see at the show, nothing to get me exiting.  There were a few clever tools in terms of clean UI and well execute ideas, but nothing of a WOW.“

Instead, the floor was dominated by B2B apps and infrastructure companies like F5 and Juniper networks, ie, companies that can make your Web 2.0 apps run faster. That’s not to say that there weren’t interesting and cool companies there like Atlassian (the company I work for ), Gomez, Sprout, and Automaticc, but they weren’t the ones that dominated the show floor.

To look at it another way… the companies that were exhibiting there were the ones that actually made money and a few VC backed startups. Of the ones I mentioned above:

Gomez is a great company that I had had experience with during the dot com era. They monitor website and network performance. I learned, too, that one of their developers, Patrick Lightbody, was an early contributor to Atlassian’s products.

Sprout had a very interesting Flash authoring tool that I could see us using some day for creating microsites.

Automaticc… needless to say, I’m a big fan of WordPress.

Swivel is like fast food for the mind, interesting but empty. Like a lot of Web 2.0 companies, it’s received some buzz but doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of helping one draw anything other than superficial conclusions. The question it leaves you with is, so what?

Explore, Compare, Share, Upload. The feature tour needs one more piece. Analysis. AKA the so what? You can draw some basic comparisons, but no conclusions. That would actually require some in-depth analysis, and just as importantly and understanding of the data. Where did it come from? How was it gathered? Who gathered it? Over what time period? Can bias be measured in the data and how will it affect the outcome?

I enjoyed Freakonomics because the authors didn’t just compare data using basic or advanced statistical analysis, they actually interpreted the results. Maybe that’s where Swivel is headed, but for now it’s a novelty.

I’m quoted in Jason Miller’s article in WebProNews on Google’s buyout of JotSpot. Interesting point about the interview, it was conducted entirely on IM. That was actually better for me — and hopefully the reader! — because it’s easier for me to think up sound bites in writing than verbally.

“It’s a bubble insofar as there’s more hype than reality. It’s different than in the late 90’s, because the technology then was often vaporware, whereas the stuff being developed today works,” said Silvers. The obstacle, he says, will be creating simple user interfaces that mesh well with other technology standards.

Not quite sure I said that last part exactly. I think what I had been writing, or had intended to convey, was that while many of the Enterprise 2.0 apps are quite cool, they don’t play well in an enterprise ecosystem. That’s a quality of any new application, of course. Start simple, then evolve based on customer needs.