My Twisted Brain

Last week some friends and I attended the Web 2.0 conference in the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. I must confess it was a bit smaller than I expected, but then it is a recession year. It also wasn’t the crazy madhouse that my last major convention experience, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), was. But there was a lot to see, and there were plenty of hungry sales folks to take up your time.

One thing that struck me was the number of social networking startups populating the aisles. Many seemed like new labels on old pants…asking the staff of booth 28b about what differentiated their social networking package from others was met with a very eloquent and verbose spiel that boiled down to, “Ours is cooler!” Having had experience with a couple of social networking mashups (with flashy categorical names like “Social Business Software packages”) sch as S. F. Bay Area based SocialText, I see the value in packaged social networking suites, but how many ways can you put together a package that has “like-Twitter”, “like-Wordpress”, “like-Wiki”, and “like-Confluence” all rolled up? In short, much of this part of our visit was somewhat of a yawn.

There were a few points of interest for me though. nomee is a social networking aggregator that puts all of the your social networking tools such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. into one online “card”. It takes this one step further by organizing it into a push, similar to RSS, which lets your followers grab that card and follow all of your social online activity at one time. All they have to do is look at your nomee card, and they know all of your Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube posting activity at a glance. I like anything that simplifies the job of keeping track of everyone’s social network activity without having to me a member of every friggin’ networking site out there!

Something else that caught my eye was (not surprisingly) another aggregator. Kapow is a company that is starting to market what they call a Mashup Server. Essentially what the server does is to run an Internet “spider” that collects information from sites that you specify, strips out the formatting, and reformats the data into a configuration that you set up. I see something like this as very interesting from more than a Web 2.0 aspect. This could also be a very important development for Web 3.0; with the ability to format a pile of Internet information any way that you please, you can take all of your favorite sites, collate all of the information in “raw” form, and format it to fit your iPhone. In an instant, you have everything that you want to know at your fingertips anywhere that you can get a signal, presorted and organized just the way you want. Between this and nomee, I can keep track of everything that I want, everywhere in the world (just about)! Pretty neat stuff!

There was lots more to see. There were a few high-Wow-factor booths (the MicroSoft Surface booth was way cool!), and some very interesting non-profit booths such as the OER Commons booth. The Open Educational Resources organization is dedicated to bringing free, open source educational resources together under one virtual roof for easy access by educators. It’s a pretty cool place (check out http://www.iskme.org for more info on this). All in all, a very interesting afternoon. I’ll be going again next year!