My colleague Rebecca Sowards-Emmerd and I have been busting our thumbs twittering our way through the Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco. It winds down tomorrow but my brain officially began overflowing today at some point. I'm pausing tonight to slow it down a bit via the "old media" of blogging, to express some of the fragments of what we've seen. Below I recap four "meta-themes" -- by no means all the themes, but four that I am struck by after four days: microblogging, openness, e-mail, mobile devices:
- (If you didn't know it already,) microblogging is hot. (Twitter et. al). The "Short Attention Span Theater" session was dynamic and successful and made it clear (if you didn't know it already) that this stuff is more broadly applicable than people might think at first blush.
- Openness is outbound AND inbound. (If you didn't know it already,) Web 2.0 is about listening to customers (Get Satisfaction; Forrester; OTIVO: are useful AND confusing the same thing?). Openness changes every enterprise: it's like group self-help.
- E-Mail: We're still working on cracking it. Data is still locked up; will we see e-mail application development platforms soon?
- Mobile devices mean weaving presence into the Web
And some of my favorite quotes from the show:
- "Getting satisfaction doesn't always mean getting your problem solved - sometimes it just means being heard" - Get Satisfaction
- "Talking openly, outside of a process-oriented environment, reflects into more passion from customers to company" - Get Satisfaction
- "I am the mobile element of my life. I do not want my phone wandering around without me." - Mitchell Baker
- "One of the great things about these technologies is that they make you focus on your customer." - Charlene Li, Forrester
- "It is a bad idea to try to change your whole company overnight." - Forrester
- "A social trend is when people use technologies to get the things they need from eachother, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations" - Forrester
- Tim O'Reilly, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke: " 'What we choose to fight is tiny! What fights us is so great' - Win or lose, make a difference."
For the event track, see: http://www.eventtrack.info/?t_event=web20expo
Thanks for listening in.
