Web 2.0, Day One

I’ve got a few minutes before things get going here at Web 2.0 today, so I thought I’d wrap up what happened here yesterday.

During his interview with John Heilemann, John Doerr (who sits on Google’s Board) indicated that the Web browser space is ripe for some action again, but that Google is not doing anything. No Google Browser?

Demos of the Snap and A9 search sites. Two interesting things about Snap: the data they’ve purchased from a “large ISP” about what people do after they search (e.g. how many pages they visited on Wal-Mart’s site and if they bought anything) and the exposure of their statistics information, including how much money they’re making on any given day. However, I’m not sure I want search results that looks like an Excel spreadsheet.

In general, I’m very skeptical about these search engines that offer second-level searching (Snap, Clusty, A9) or personalized search. I’m not convinced that people are going to spend that much time tinkering with their searches. Search results are not a mp3 collection or photos…I don’t know how much time people are going to want to spent organizing them.

Heard a curious phrase last night…companies are doing lots of deals with other companies because they’re “not Google”. That is, Google would rather hire people to build stuff for them than partner with companies (which seems a bit self-centered to me). So it seems there’s lots of opportunities out there for smaller companies trying to compete with Google to partner with Google’s larger competitors.

And finally, the design of the paper program here at Web 2.0 is, shall we say, less than optimal. There’s no single listing of events in the program that contains the 3 vital bits of information attendees need: event description, time, and place. The description and time are listed on one page and then you need to flip to another page to figure out where it’s being held. Annoying, especially since it seems like the program is designed for maximum ad space rather than for usability.