I’ve now finished two full days of the Web 2.0 Summit conference, and unfortunately have to catch a red-eye flight back to the East Coast without having the opportunity to participate in the third and final day of the conference. And before I get overwhelmed with a whole new set of meetings, deadlines, and other activities upon my return, I thought it would be useful to record some overall impressions and reactions.

Obviously, if you’ve been attending the same conference, you can form your own opinions and conclusions. But if you’re one of the millions (or billions) of people who didn’t attend, you might be asking yourself: should I have attended this conference? If it runs again next year, should I plan to attend it? If you’re giving these questions any serious thought at all, then I can skip the “generic” caveats and qualifications, and simply say, Yes, do plan on attending, if you can find room in your budget for what seems to be just about the most expensive technical conference on the planet these days. Expensive or not, Web 2.0 is where the buzz is located, and the Web 2.0 Summit is where all of the key buzz-ers and buzz-ees are congregating to talk about what’s hot, and what’s not.

Having said that, this conference was too crowded, too noisy, and too chaotic; if it continues to grow the way it did this year, it’s either going to self-destruct or turn into another Comdex circus. And maybe that’s what the organizers are planning: as I reported in yesterday’s blog, they turned away some 5,000 would-be attendees for this event, and they’re planning to accommodate this frustrated crowd at a Web 2.0 expo next April 15-17. I don’t know how they’re planning to separate the two groups — maybe it will be rich vs. poor, or managers vs. peons, or marketing/media folks vs. techie nerds. I assume the conference website and promotional material will eventually make that clear, and all of us can then figure out which of the two events make the most sense.

But assuming it was only this event that was available to us, here are my overall reactions and observations, for whatever they’re worth:

• I can’t think of any other event where you could listen to so many of the Web 2.0 “movers and shakers” in one place; it that sense, it probably is very much like Comdex in its heyday. Yesterday and today, I had the chance to listen to Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), Barry Diller, Arthur Sulzberger, Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon), Bruce Chisholm (CEO of Adobe), Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, Morgan Stanley financial analyst extraordinaire Mary Meeker, Mark Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com), Ross Levinsohn (President of Fox Interactive Media), Marc Andreesen (developer of the Netscape Navigator browser), Jim Lanzone (CEO of Ask.com), Jonathan Miller (CEO of AOL), Ray Ozzie (Chief Scientist at Microsoft), and several others whose names might not be quite so familiar to you, but whose accomplishments and successes are breath-taking. If I had stayed through tomorrow, I would also have listened to Kevin Rose (founder of Digg), David Filo (co-founder of Yahoo), and another bunch of people. In the Wall Street world described so hilariously in Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, people like these were known as the “big swinging dicks” of their field. This alone was worth the admission price.
• But aside from the big names (none of whom I know personally, and none of whom I had a chance to talk to), I really didn’t know anyone at the conference, and didn’t have a chance to have more than a few scattered words of conversation with the people I happened to be sitting with at lunch. There were lots of very intense conversations going on, and I have no idea whether they were taking place between long-lost acquaintances, new-found friends, salespeople and potential victims customers, or simply people who wanted to shout at one another over the din. But it was simply too noisy, too frenetic, too intense to have any kind of “quality” conversation about anything. To be fair, I didn’t spend much time at the post-session cocktail reception (again, too noisy and frenetic) or the evening dinner session (I was too tired, and besides, I wanted to go back to my hotel room to watch the mid-term election returns).
• Because of this difficulty of carrying on traditional face-to-face conversations, I found it curious that the conference organizers didn’t emphasize, highlight, or foster any blogs, wikis, discussion forums, or other community-building mechanisms during the conference. It was only after I headed to the airport that I found a link on the main conference page identified as a ” Summit wiki,” which actually turned out to be a page containing several other links to attendee lists and various other resources. The attendee list page had only 45 entries, out of 1,400 attendees, so I don’t think many other people noticed it either. If I have the chance to attend next year’s event, this is something I’ll definitely look for before and during the conference.
• The technology infrastructure wasn’t as bad as some of the conferences I attended, but it certainly wasn’t first-class, and it certainly didn’t seem adequate, given the extravagant price we paid for admission; I think far more money was spent on muffins and bottled water than adequate Wi-Fi support for a large audience of laptop-toting attendees. In the grand ballroom where most of the general sessions took place, there were probably a dozen places where you could plug in your AC power adaptor, which meant several hundred people had to hope their battery power would suffice. And while there was a free Wi-Fi network provided by AOL, it was overloaded to the point of being almost useless. So much for the happy talk about “pervasive broadband access to the Internet” that all the speakers took as a “given” for virtually everyone on the planet.
• There was very little discussion of technology: Ajax was mentioned only once or twice in the sessions I attended, and architectural concepts like REST were mentioned only two or three times. Maybe that’s going to get more emphasis and coverage in the “Expo” conference scheduled for next spring.
• I was delighted to see the acknowledgment of the important (and sometimes leading, perhaps even dominant) role of Europe, China, Japan, Korea, and other parts of the world in the Web 2.0 universe, with presentations from Niklas Zennstrom, Jack Ma, Joichi Ito, Hyun-Oh Yu (CEO of Cyworld), and many others. For those living, working, or even visiting Silicon Valley (where, for all practical purposes, this conference took place), it’s important to remember that it’s a big world out there, and that there’s a lot of very important Web 2.0 development taking place outside Silicon Valley.
• I was intrigued to see the emphasize on “physical infrastructure” issues that large-scale Web 2.0 providers are forced to devote more and more attention to: physical data centers, server farms, electrical power, etc. Jeff Bezos gave a very interesting presentation on this topic in this morning’s keynote, focusing on Amazon’s recent product announcements of Simple Storage Service (S3) for instantly, infinitely expandable storage space at $0.15 per gigabyte per month, and Elastic Compute Cloud, for scalable computational power available for roughly $70 per month (but also available on an hourly basis) for the equivalent of a 1-gigahertz server.
• Maybe this will be covered in the final day of the conference that I’ll be missing, but so far, I haven’t heard very much about the future: what comes after the advertising-based business model that has spawned Google and Yahoo and others? If e-mail was the first killer app, the basic web browser was the 2nd killer app, and the (Google) search engine is the current killer app, what comes next? Is the next killer app something along the lines of Wikipedia — i.e., a truly massive, civilization-changing open-source, mass-collaboration project? Why aren’t we talking about it? (Actually, Don Tapscott did talk about it for about 10 minutes; see below.)
• There was also no focus on the next generation of society, and how they’re going to use the Internet. I’m not talking about the teenagers who are busy with MySpace; I’m talking about the young kids who are just learning how to read, tie their shoes, and make a phone call. We’ve got another 5-10 years before they begin playing a really active role in society, and it would be nice if we had some idea of their expectations, assumptions, fears, likes, and dislikes. I didn’t get a sense that anyone at this conference had given even a moment’s thought to such issues. There are people thinking about this area, but we didn’t hear their ideas. This is somewhat ironic, because the author of Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, Don Tapscott, was one of today’s speakers, but he gave a 10-minute presentation on a forthcoming book on mass collaboration, entitled Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.
• With all of the supposed benefits from Web 2.0 in the area of communication, collaboration, and community, I didn’t hear anyone give us any examples, insights, guidance, or even simple ideas for attacking the really serious problems facing mankind: hunger, world peace, global warming, depletion of natural resources, etc. Obviously, there’s a technical component to all of these problems, and an opportunity for technology to be used to help solve or ameliorate them. But the problems of world peace — just to use one example — is first and foremost a people issue, articulated plaintively by Rodney King’s question, “Can’t we all just get along?” Can Web 2.0 provide any significant assistance in helping us “just get along”? Has it done so already? If so, where? How? If not, why not? It’s all very nice that self-centered teenagers are using MySpace to gossip with one another, but why don’t we have a similar social network so that Shiites and Sunnis, or Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics, or rabid Republicans and rabid Democrats, can begin to communicate with each other? Why aren’t we talking about issues like these at the Web 2.0 Summit?

So there’s still a lot to be done, a lot to improve, a lot to talk about. I have no idea whether the organizers and planners of the Web 2.0 Summit are paying attention to any of these issues, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best next year. And next year, I will check the conference blogs and wikis before I show up. But for now, it’s time to drag my weary body onto the red-eye flight and head back to the Center of the Universe.