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Liveblogging Web 2.0 Summit: Conference Wrap-Up -- Where Is Web 2.0 Going?

John Battelle of Federated Media, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, and Eric Faurot, senior VP at CMP, got together this afternoon to put out an overview of the Web 2.0 Summit and look at the future of Web 2.0 in cell phones, sensors, and more.

Battelle and O'Reilly are programming co-chairs of the conference; O'Reilly Media and CMP are the co-sponsors of the conference. CMP is the parent company of InformationWeek.

O: Web 2.0 is now mainstream. The theme of the conference, "The Edge," reflects the new places the Web is going. "Where are the places the Web hasn't hit?"

Kind of weird to be doing the conference wrap-up near the end of the second of three days. I'm guessing the conference organizers wanted to be able to hit the deadline for weekly publications.

B: Mobile is in the future, but it's having trouble taking off because it's hard to fund developers in the current economic climate.

"Mobile is interesting, but it's not really part of Web 2.0." Jaiku is interesting, but it's a separate ecosystem, and until it opens up it will remain a separate ecosystem. It's its own island.

Battelle leaves.

O: "I would expect that mobile will start joining the Internet in an interesting way."

There's a huge opportunity to turn the kind of data the phone has into services. "How ridiculous that Facebook has to ask who my friends are -- my phone knows who my friends are." Phone companies aren't doing enough to leverage the Web 2.0 information they have.

Sensors are under-represented here. Phones are censors. "A camera is a sensor, a credit-card reader is a sensor." One retailer in the U.K. uses cell phone monitoring rather than cameras to track traffic -- because the phones are phoning home.

Company competing with Nielsen -- they give you a special cell phone which wakes up occasionally and listens for nearby TV audio.

With the PC, hardware became king. Later, software became king. With the Internet, software is no longer king -- the Internet drives software commoditization. "Things that used to have value become free and open and the value goes somewhere else."

Aggregating data, and extracting meaning, is valuable today. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was asked yesterday if Facebook would let users export its data. Facebook can afford to do that, because the real value of the data is in aggregating the social maps.

Google has access to the same Web as everyone, but Google is better at extracting meaning.

When someone gets too big, they take more out of the network than they put in. Take Microsoft, for example -- they grew by building a great development network, but started to put their own software companies out of business.

Right now, Google plays nice, but when they've maxed out the online advertising market, will they still? Or will they start fighting dirty?

Battelle looked at financial markets for precedent -- big retail investment companies like Goldman Sachs now make more money investing their own money than their customers'. "Eventually the insiders go, 'Why are we doing these services for everybody else?' "

When do the big guys on the Web start "consuming the clicks?" They used to link off to Weather.com, now they show you the weather themselves.

Once the market becomes "consolidated enough" with big companies, the opportunities for startups dry up.

Dawn Applegate, spokeswoman for O'Reilly Media: The conference is 1,000 people -- limited intentionally by invitation.

Faurot: "It's weird to have a Web 2.0 conference and have it be by-invitation-only." That's why they launched Web 2.0 Expo.

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