I’m sitting in a corner during a break on the afternoon of the 2nd day of this year’s 3-day Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco. I’ve lost track of the number of workshops, keynote presentations, “conversations,” and short 10-minute “high order bit” presentations I’ve heard so far; and there are many more to go, between now and the conference’s conclusion tomorrow afternoon (click here to see the conference schedule). I’m jotting notes as fast as I can — sometimes on my laptop, sometimes with old-fashioned paper and pencil; but I haven’t had time to put it all together into a cogent synthesis. With any luck, I’ll be able to do that, on the cross-country flight back to New York City.

There have been several good presentations on trends, forecasts, and predictions; perhaps the most intense, data-packed presentation was Mary Meeker’s 15-minute presentation of 48 slides on current Internet trends from Morgan Stanley, which you can download as a PDF file by clicking here.

Though the presentations have covered several different aspects of technology, products, services, and markets, there have been two prevailing themes: the increasing important of web-based applications (as opposed to desktop PC applications), and the increasing importance of social networks (e.g., MySpace, Facebook). And while the slides and “official” comments have been great, I have often been most intrigued by the off-the-cuff remarks by the speakers, and in the panel sessions. For example, in the Wednesday-morning workshop/panel on web apps, a panelist from Intuit mentioned that six million new businesses are created each year in the U.S. — and these new businesses have, by definition, no legacy apps, no infrastructure, and no particular incentive to install a complex collection of traditional PC-based enterprise applciations.

SImilarly, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg casually mentioned, during his session yesterday afternoon, that in the 5 months since Facebook opened up its API to external developers, some 6,000 Facebook applications have been created — and there are now roughly 100,000 Facebook app developers.

The next session is about to begin, so I’m going to continue taking notes. Once I’ve made an attempt to synthesize all of this, I’ll upload a longer, and hopefully more detailed, post. And you can expect that by early next week, I’ll incorporate a lot of the links and URL’s that I’ve picked up at the conference into the next version of my “ugly Betty” Web 2.0 presentation.