A Day of Mashups, Wikis, AJAX and Open Source

Energetic, young and crowded. Developers-turned-entrepreneurs filled the halls to hear Google, Yahoo and Interactive slip hints as to what they'll acquire next. Open source zealots cheered on the demonstrations (on Mac OS, of course) of new web services stitched together in the hopes of attracting huge communities. Zimbra impressed all with the search and sharing features of its AJAX collaboration suite. Ross Mayfield showed off SocialText's cool Wiki apps, and AllPeers demonstrated an application framework that I can't explain because I don't understand (ok, they had only 6 minutes). Rollyo impressed me with its ability to develop new search engines on the fly, and Michael Tanne (Flock angel) of Wink showed collaborative filtering at work in search. Orb streamed a video from its CTO's living room, and remotely turned on his lamp. Jumping on the bandwagon, KnowNow re-spun its alert service as an RSS alternative (but the software persisted in displaying annoying pop-ups during the subsequent demos). Real Travel, ZVents (click this: ), Writely, PubSub all demoed well.

My favorite, of course, was Flock, even though the company obviously jumped the gun demonstrating a feature or two that weren't yet ready for the spotlight (at least not in its Mac browser). Coincidentally, the Flock launch was today's #1 read story on BusinessWeek.com.

Web2.0 was a great place for me to catch up with other VC's, such as my blog muses Fred Wilson, Stewart Alsop, Ryan Macintyre, Nivi, and Dave Beisel. I also ran into lots of enterprise-focused VCs like Mitch Kertzman and Mike Orsak showing up to see what all the fuss is about.

In one year the Web2.0 show has evolved from a band of angel-funded startups sharing ideas to a myriad of VC-backed companies touting their products. Next year, will O'Reilly have to rename the event Bubble2.0?