I visited eight Web 2.0 companies in the San Francisco Bay area last week, and was intrigued by the range of products and services they’re offering; you can see the details in my blog entries for the past week.

But I was also intrigued by some common themes that I heard from almost every company I visited. I’ll itemize them briefly here, and then discuss each of them in more detail in the next few days:

1. Email is broken — not in the sense that Salon magazine and various blog posters (e.g., here and here) complained in 2003, when it appeared that we were being completely overwhelmed with spam, but in the sense that it doesn’t adequately support our day-to-day business and workflow needs. More on that tomorrow.
2. Young adults use the Internet in a different way than do 30-something and 40-something professional workers — I’m not referring to the tendency of high-school and college-age kids to post every intimate detail of their social life on MySpace and Friendster, but rather that their “social” perspective (”where are my friends, and what are they doing today?”) means that they’re less willing to move into a computer-supported world where they rely on e-mail, Powerpoint, Excel, and Microsoft Outlook to organize their day-to-day lives. Again, more on this in the days to come.
3. People don’t like to “break context” to grab additional information to perform a work task — if we’re in the middle of doing something in our email program, or our calendar program, or an ERP system for processing purchase orders, we may find it necessary to “grab” some information that would normally require switching into another program — looking at a map to see where a customer’s office is located. But in today’s world of Web 2.0 mashups, we want to be able to do that while remaining fully immersed in the original application where most of our work is taking place. Vendors are catering to this preference more and more, as I’ll discuss in a separate blog posting in a couple days.
4. Most vendors believe that mobile devices will play a large role in the evolution of their products and services, but they’re not sure what form it will take — by which I don’t mean to suggest that vendors are clueless about mobile technology, but simply that they’re how fast the hardware and software infrastructures will evolve, or what the marketplace preferences will be (another area where inter-generational differences are likely to be significant), or what kind of user interface will make sense, once we’ve reached the limit of what we can do with our thumbs.
5. Web 2.0 may be over-hyped, and some of its vendors may not have a rational business model, but it’s nevertheless “real”. Most of the companies I visited have been in business for three or four years, if not longer. They’re either profitable, or generating near-break-even revenues, or at least they’ve got a sufficiently credible business model that they’ve been able to raise two or three rounds of venture capital. But everyone I spoke to was dismayed by the latest wave of startup companies, which either have no business model at all (”we just want to get people interested in our product/service, and we’ll figure out how to monetize it later”), or a naive belief that they can build a profitable business through advertising-based revenues. But notwithstanding these concerns, along with some cynicism about the slightly crazy amounts of venture capital that’s becoming available, the unanimous consensus was th at Web 2.0 is real. However you define it, and whatever it means to you (e.g., is it just the “read/write Web,” or just mashups, or just software-as-service, or just network-as-platform?), there’s something fundamentally different about the way business and society are using the Internet than they were five years ago.

One reason for the consistency with which I heard these themes is that Silicon Valley is — just as it has been for the past thirty or forty years — a very incestuous place. It seemed that everyone I met on this trip knew everyone else that I had already met, or was about to meet; many of them worked together during the dot-com era of the late 90s, and I suspect that if I had asked some personal questions, I would have discovered that many of them had been married to each other, living with each other, or even related to each other. All of which means that there’s a certain degree of reinforcement of popular philosophies and strategies; they’re all drinking the same Web 2.0 KoolAid.

But that’s okay: this is an older and wiser bunch of folks than the ones who created the dot-com empire, with the strident predictions that their “new world” would sweep away the obsolete brick-and-mortar business world. It’s still a good idea to read blogs like Dead 2.0 from time to time (see, for example,”Kiko sells for $258,093 more than actual value,” which has some interesting comments about Web 2.0 and failure), just to be sure we don’t drink too much KoolAid — but for now, I’m pretty optimistic about the future of Web 2.0.