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Beware The Bubble Machine At Web 2.0 Expo

The Web 2.0 Summit was so popular last year that we decided to team up again with O'Reilly and get jiggy with the start-ups. Time to polish up your elevator pitch and don't forget your score card.

My compatriots and me are hunkered down at the Web 2.0 Expo, which is in San Francisco this week. What strikes me most about this show of 10,000 attendees is the number of people who are passionate about mashups and ubiquitous software... although cooperation is not always the rule of the day. You should see the look on Microsoft's face when you talk about Adobe's rich Internet application platforms. It's not for the squeamish.

What is also exciting are the large number of guerilla meetings -- called Web 2Opens -- where you show up in a hallway and talk about whatever is on your mind. Priceless.

What worries me, however, is something Evan Williams has been saying for a while now. and I paraphrase: In Web 2.0, there are a lot of different companies, but not all of the technologies need to be a company. So true. If the market goes crazy again like it's 1999, then the pundits will have won and the technology will be commoditized too early.

So here are my picks:

What to look for:
-- Cool names. How can you miss with a search engine for people called Spock?
-- Smaller companies with larger relationships. Six Apart, Socialtext, NewsGator, SimpleFeed, Visible Path and SpikeSource all have ties to Intel. A chipmaker with Web 2.0 aspirations? This I gotta see.
-- Hitwise's six next big things: Yelp, StumbleUpon, Veoh, WeeWorld, Imeem, and Piczo.

What to avoid:
-- Any company that hasn't talked to Sequoia, StartupCapital or V.C. of equal caliber
-- Products not tapped into Python, Perl or Ruby on Rails (please be quiet when you pass by Room Six).
-- Attempts to attach Web 2.0 to a legacy product that wasn't designed to do that in the first place.
-- Anything that looks like you are giving up your personal information.

See you on the show floor. We wrap up on Wednesday.

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