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October 08, 2004

Trends at the Web 2.0 Conference

I've spent the last few days blogging the Web 2.0 Conference in nearly real time on my weblog. While I haven't had time to catch my breath and digest all the great discussions, I have noticed a few trends. I expected the vast majority of the discussion to be about Web Services (REST, SOAP, APIs, etc) and how they're changing the world, but there were two other pervasive themes getting a lot of attention--far more than I expected.

Personal Web Search and Beyond
The recent moves by Yahoo! (you saw last week's My Yahoo Search announcement, right?), A9, and Ask Jeeves to personalize and expand web search really have people thinking and talking. It came up in repeated sessions and hallway discussions. During the Search as a Platform panel discussion, Jeff Weiner noted that there's a lot of room for search to expand--especially in the Local Search arena.

As he said, our local search is really just the beginning. There is still a lot of work to be done to make search more relevant and personal. A big piece of that involves working to discern intent. When you search for a particular set of keywords, what's your goal? Are you doing research? Looking to buy something? Trying to find a long lost friend? As search engines begin to understand our goals and motivations, they'll be able to custom tailor the results to get what you're looking for even faster.

The overall feeling I got from all the search related discussion and announcements is that there's a lot to look forward to in the search world, both as heavy user of search and someone who's fascinated by the technology. I really wonder what sort of refinements we'll be talking about a year from now. John Battelle joked that our current web search interfaces are a lot like the old DOS command line. If that's the case, the next generation could be as revolutionary as Windows or the Macintosh were.

RSS Advertising
While I expected to hear some discussion of RSS advertising and feed monetization, I was really surprised. RSS advertising talk was everywhere.

This really goes to show how quickly things can change in the on-line world. Two years ago RSS was still under the radar for most publishers. One year ago nobody was talking about advertising in RSS feeds. They were often just headlines and excerpts--teaser content used to get traffic back to your site. But with RSS really gaining steam this year, everyone's looking for ways to work ads into feeds. Keep an eye on this one. I expect to see a lot of rapid innovation in the next year from all over the industry. Entirely new companies have already popped up in this market. And at this point the technology, the business model, and even the ad formats are up for grabs right now.

Jeremy Zawodny
Technical Yahoo!

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Comments

What? No mention of the new top page beta? ;)

Thanks for the conference rundown, Jeremy. Very helpful.

Posted by: jr | October 8, 2004 09:36 AM

It is such rubbish that you guys are promoting the new My Yahoo! and still not allowing the SBC/My Yahoo! users the opportunity to participate in the upgrade. Just tonight I was reading about how great the new My Yahoo! was on SF Fist and I posted my reply to their article below:

"Last week Yahoo! announced their new and improved My Yahoo is a little misleading. First it's not an actual release but a beta and 2nd if you happen to have the rotten luck of being stuck as an SBC/My Yahoo! customer (many of us in the Bay Area) then YOU unfortunately cannot participate in the beta. Yes I know, you pay, and the free My Yahoo! account don't but hey who said life was fair."

C'mon if you are not going to let your paid customers upgrade at least give a real and valid reason why or at least give me the opportunity to OPT OUT OF THE STUPID AND USELESS SBC/MY YAHOO! deal and go back to being a free customer like everyone else.

I shouldn't be penalized just because I happen to use SBC as my internet provider. Maybe I should just cancel my SBC account and have the cable modem back in so that I don't have to be lumped together with all the second rate SBC lepers on the internet.

Tom

Posted by: Thomas Hawk | October 8, 2004 07:46 PM

Thomas.

Let me put this simply.

You can use the new my page, simply go to the migrate page.
http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/migrate?.t=3
Click on the big gray button.

That's it. That's all you need to do.

(Actually, from the looks of it, it appears that the SBC folks got updated recently anyway.)

Posted by: Anonymous | October 12, 2004 08:00 AM

Thomas -- we hear your frustrations, however, it is important to note that the service is a beta, which means that we are continuing to work out the kinks.

We are planning on rolling out the My Yahoo! enhancements to our SBC Yahoo! members before the end of the year. This is consistent with how we always looks to extend service improvements to our SBC Yahoo! members. This allows both Yahoo! and SBC to make sure the service works well and is virtually bug free.

Posted by: The SBC Yahoo! Product Team | October 13, 2004 10:54 AM

Dear Editor,

I have recently tried out the conferencing tool from imconferencing.com. It is a one stop shop for
SMB's for all the conferencing features. It is
feature rich and even has MPEG-4 video streaming
over broadband network making it even more lucrative.It has all the features available with Webex at a great prize.
It has the conventional whiteboarding,opinion poll
presentation and screen sharing tools.
To my surprise their screen sharing and video
got through my proxy and firewall settings
without compromising much of quality. I would
really appreciate it if you could do a writeup on
this product so that it would benifit the webseminarians.
The trial page can be found at http://www.imconferencing.com/trial/landingpage.aspx

It has all the features available with Webex at a great prize.
Regards
Sanjana

Posted by: sanjana | July 31, 2005 08:48 PM