ANALYSIS Web 2.0 broadens its appeal

ANALYSIS Web 2.0 broadens its appeal
Dan Fost, Chronicle Staff Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? file=/c/a/2007/04/19/BUGU9PB4S91.DTL

Web 2.0 is ready for the masses.

Although the term itself is too geeky to strike a chord with average Internet cruisers, the key concepts of Web 2.0 -- blogs, wikis, collaboration, the ability to reach niche markets and for average citizens to connect with many other people -- are starting to take hold.

The Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco's Moscone Center this week, which wrapped up Wednesday, provided the strongest evidence yet that the movement is ready to leap from the cloistered world of nerds to corporate America and across a general Internet population.

The Expo drew 11,000 people, many from far-flung corners of the globe, looking to learn how to reinvigorate their business online. Unlike past Web 2.0 conferences, which were pricey invitation-only confabs, this one was open to anyone who wanted to pony up $1,495, and included a trade show floor full of booths touting the latest technology. It even featured an "unconference" that didn't cost a dime, in which participants decided the agenda on the fly.

"This is not the summit, with the top 1,000 people getting together for cocktails and strategy," said Chris Tolles, 39, vice president of marketing for Topix, a Palo Alto company that provides local news online. "This is the non-Web 2.0 states coming in and saying, 'You have something to teach us. What is it?' "

The answer, according to Tolles, is "a new way of doing business, and it's more efficient. You can put your customer right in touch with the key people at your company, not with the marketing department."

It's allowing people at all levels of a company to write blogs, as a way of getting the word out about what companies are doing. It's using wiki sites -- which allow people to collaborate and edit each other's work online, in the spirit of the user-written online encyclopedia Wikipedia -- to encourage teamwork in the corporate world.

One entrepreneur who declined to be identified for fear of seeming to disparage the horde of attendees said, "A lot of them are aspirational. They come from Topeka asking basic questions, like, 'How do I sell my company to Yahoo?' and 'Why is it that venture capitalists only fund people that they know?' "

Well, the VCs aren't hard to find, this entrepreneur said, noting many have blogs telling exactly how they like to be pitched. "The hurdles are there for a reason," he said.

"They think they can go to a session and come out and create the next Digg," he added, referring to a San Francisco news aggregator popular with the geek crowd for the way it lets the audience vote on which stories should get the most prominent placement.

The admission of such newbies to the hall feels like the end of an era to some.

"Going down on the Expo floor, it's amazing to see how many companies there are now," said Scott Beale, the proprietor of Laughing Squid, a San Francisco Web hosting company. "It's hard to imagine that they're all real companies."

Beale has been on the scene for more than a decade, and is the unofficial court photographer of the Web 2.0 scene. "Being involved, it used to be that we knew all the companies," he said.

Web 2.0 was in part a backlash to the posers and the big money that characterized the dot-com scene of the late 1990s. The people who promoted the ideas of community and the wisdom of crowds were not necessarily looking to cash out, but felt they could use technology to make the world a better place, or at least to empower individuals.

But as their ideas have taken hold, some of the same frothiness that characterized the dot-com bubble is percolating to the top of the Internet zeitgeist again.

Companies exhibiting at the Expo "are acting in the old way of having a lot of swag and an elaborate booth," Beale said. "We're going to start to see companies from outside our community, doing their own thing, and they may not play by the unspoken guidelines of the community."

In the Web 2.0 community, Beale said, competitors show each other their products, and often wind up collaborating. They take money from angel investors, rather than venture capitalists, whom they see as willing to sell them out at the first opportunity.

"People are going in with a monetary focus from the start," he said. "These guys are looking to exploit some part of it."

Beale said he doesn't learn about technology from a trade show booth, instead relying on friends in the industry. It's the viral method that helps technologies like Twitter, a micro-blogging text message service from San Francisco's Obvious Corp., take hold among the Web 2.0 in-crowd.

But at the Expo, companies are throwing big parties and setting up splashy booths. NetVibes, a French company that lets people set up Web pages that can pull feeds from a variety of different photo, video and blogging sites, threw a party Monday night at the 111 Minna art gallery that had a line around the block before it began.

Cambrian House, a Canadian company that is creating a place for people to do business online, or even sell their business, set up a booth with a Polynesian theme, complete with a grass hut. CEO Michael Sikorsky, 34, who is moving the company to Mountain View, said he has invoked ire from some of the early Web 2.0 idealists for his almost crassly capitalistic approach.

"They hated our hype engine," he said. He uses any gimmicks at his disposal. When he created the company, he hired temp workers to deliver 1,000 pizzas to Google. His latest scheme is to give a share of stock in the company to anyone who signs up for his service. He plans to ultimately sell the company or have a public stock offering, rather than follow many others who say they want to become big on their own.

"We really are built to flip," he said. "I'm the only guy who says that out loud. I don't know why everyone lies."



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