Julia French, who represented Sprout and Oracle Trampoline Systems, at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
I spent one day at Web 2.0 Expo this week, jotted down some notes, take a couple of dozen photos, then headed back home to rest, per doctor’s orders. Here are a few highlights:
Marc Andreesen
Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape and Ning, offered an interesting historical overview of the browser in a talk with Web 2.0 co-host John Battelle. The word "browser" is no longer so apt. "Who browses on the Web anymore?" he said. But when Andreesen developed Mosaic, and then the Netscape browser, none of the conventions of how we get around the Web had been invented yet. So Andreesen invented the browser. He and his team invented bookmarks, knowing that something better would come along (although here we are, 15 years later, and still use bookmarks). He recalled that they needed a way to populate an online shopping cart and then check out, so over a single weekend he and Web pioneer Vint Cerf invented cookies.
Today, he pointed out, we are still not only using the browser but adding all kinds of adds-ons and widgets to it to conduct social networking, to use media, to play music and so on. While instant messaging is slowly declining, young people today are using social networking to communicate with each other. "The browser may last another 15-20 years before the next big thing comes along," Andreesen said.
In the short term, he told Battelle, Ning supports the concept of data portability, giving people control over the media and content they create. "Import and export to your heart’s content," Andreesen said.
Jonathan Zittrain
Oxford University’s Jonathan Zittrain, whom I interviewed for my book Darknet, has a new book out that echoes the chief themes of Darknet: The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It.
Zittrain told the assembled movers and shakers of the tech world, via a videotaped appearance, that we’re suffering from a collective complacency, that there’s an assumption that we’ll always be able to "hack our way to a better future." For 30 years we’ve lived with the metaphor of reprogrammable desktop computing, where we controlled what our machines did. "I see that era drawing to a close with pretty big implications," he said.
We’ve begun a steady migration to appliances like the iPhone or iPod that have third-party applications carefully controlled by a central gatekeeper. "I see that structure as the structure of the future," Zittrain said, with alarming implications for freedom and innovation.
"The open application environment is being throttled one bit at a time," he said. "I’m concerned we’ll wind up in a world where we won’t even know what we’ve lost."
Sounds like an important book, I’ll be ordering it. (Though too bad that Amazon.com doesn’t recognize Darknet as a book with a very closely connected theme, much more so than the other "related" titles.)
Quick hits
• Here’s a piece I wrote at the IdeaLab blog about Web 2.0’s blogger lounge vs. the traditional press lounge.
• Some of the most interesting companies I bumped into in the exhibition area:
– MindTouch, a wiki-like platform for the enterprise.
– Oosah, a way to find, organize and share photos videos, photos and music anywhere on the Web.
– Profy, which launched Wednesday, a new blog and social networking platform.
• 6 new startups at the SF Launchpad. I generally don’t pay much attention to these, since they pay ($5,000? $10,000?) for these high-profile spots.
• Facebook now has 70 million active users and is the sixth most trafficked site in the world. More than 20 million applications have been built on the Facebook platform since it opened up less than a year ago. (I probably have half of these on my profile page.)
• Dave McClure’s T-shirt: "Microformats.org — We do it with class."
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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