In case you didn’t catch this, a couple of days ago Tim O’Reilly asked the Twittersphere if they’d like to put any questions to the CEO of Sun, about an hour before he was to interview him on-stage at the Web 2.0 Expo in SF this week. 
(Photo by James Duncan Davidson.) Well, Tim was wondering why he wasn’t seeing any questions coming through on Twitter, till he realized (too late) that he had his Twitter app settings wrong on his smart phone! (Unfortunately, he was only getting replies from those he was following.) Well, I wasn’t on Tim’s follow list, so my question, which I submitted within minutes of when he Twittered about this, was missed … along with a whole bunch of other people’s questions.
A few hours after the session ended, I saw a tweet from Tim where he graciously had decided he would do a blog post to ask those Twittered questions of Schwartz via email, after the fact. That exchange took a day or so, but Tim just posted the resulting Q&A yesterday, here: Missed Twitter Questions from Jonathan Schwartz Interview at Web 2.0 Expo.
So, as you’ll see on Tim’s post, my question (about blogging and Twittering, of course) did get asked, and answered — and, thanks to Twitter, I didn’t even have to go the conference! 🙂 There were several other good questions that Schwartz answered as well. The hint about what’s to come regarding Sun’s "network.com" offering is especially interesting. Thanks, Tim, for the great recovery — you’re forgiven!
The CEOs of two widget syndication networks, 
Watch for another link to Read/Write Web soon, a recap of the whole Web 2.0 Expo experience. And I hope to be writing for this great blog again in the future. It was also fun hanging out again with Alex Iskold, a regular writer at Read/Write Web, who’s also founder of 
He says Yahoo wants to connect its consumers with what they value the most. Connecting social media assets seemed to be a theme of his vague answers to Battelle’s attempts to get something quotable. Though John did come up with one quotable question: “Wall Street yawned at your earnings yesterday, versus Google recently hitting it out of the park. Are they running circles around you?” To which Weiner largely responded by saying Panama is going really well — just ask the ad networks, etc. “You have the largest network on the web,” said Battelle. “Why am I asking you about Google?” Weiner’s response was that everyone likes what’s hot, but “it’s about building things that last.” And he cited other new developments, such as Yahoo Pipes and the newspaper consortium deal they announced, with 265 papers and 50 million unique users. He downplayed Google’s dominance in search by saying “it’s only one part of the dialog.” He reminded us that Yahoo is #1 in other areas of the web, including finance, and that “there’s a reason for that.” He said intellectual property holders like to be able to “leverage their brands on top of our platform.” Weiner wouldn’t comment on any Facebook talks (of course), but he said that site “has done a great job,” and that they get the notion of “network individualism” quite well. He said there’s no pressure at Yahoo to do big acquisitions, but there is to get the company’s strategy right. “We have tremendous assets to be leveraged.” It’s his job to pull these assets together, and there is pressure with that. But he said he has a great team. 
He said the local online ad business is a big one, with 6 million local businesses in the U.S., and a good percentage of the 500,000 advertisers Google now has on its site are local firms. The bad news they discovered, however, was that there wasn’t enough local content. There are 1400 local papers in the U.S., but they can’t produce sufficient content. Besides, “Mainstream media is going away — the Internet is destroying the print advertising that pays for it.” So, in 2005, Topix decided to implement blogs for its content. “We thought that might fix our content problem.” And that it did, said Skrenta. What’s more, when Topix allowed comments to be added to these local stories, it increased their page views by six or eight times. The site now has local content and reader comments for 20,000 towns nationally, and comments are posted daily in 1000 of those. This is America speaking out, he implied — everyday people. “These are not TechCrunch readers,” Skrenta declared. “The conversation is local.”
“We’re second only to the ad business in revenues,” he said. [Okay, a distant second, but still…] “Enterprise 2.0 is all about user choice and collaboration, as we move from individual to group productivity.” I loved Farber’s sarcastic comment here, that, if participation is really applied Web 2.0 style to the enterprise, “we can just have everyone vote — a great way to run a company!” He asked Satish Dharmaraj, the CEO of 
Farber asked the Zimbra CEO what he thought about employees wasting time online: “Certain people are going to goof off no matter what. They were doing it in the ’90s with GeoCities.” On the topic of online apps, Glotzbach said that Google’s emerged to let workers choose the way they want to work. “Is your entire company on these apps?” asked Farber. “Pretty much,” said Glotzbach, “but probably not the hardcore finance people — they’re not a replacement for their desktop apps.” Mayfield said SocialText created “SocialPoint,” which is a combination of wiki and Sharepoint functionality. “So, what do you guys offer to make a CIO replace Microsoft Office desktop apps?” asked Farber. “We probably can’t replace those,” Glotzbach said. “But we can meet special needs of some firms, such in the area of mobile apps.” Dharmaraj of Zimbra noted that Web 2.0 apps can be hosted in your own data center, and that this approach could be an option for firms wanting to shift from a Microsoft-centric environment. “And soon all web apps will have to have an offline component,” he said. “Mashups of all of us here are very possible and feasible,” said Google’s Glotzbach. 
SocialText’s Ross Mayfield got the last word. “Standards are still needed. And it’s not just about developers anymore, but users doing apps,” he said. “You have to share control to add value.”
Co-founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Joost claims to “fill a gap in the online video entertainment arena,” providing a premium interactive video experience, while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators. Van Gulik said the technology is “pure HTML and Javascript,” and he put on an awesome display of features and capabilities — I’m sure to the largest crowd yet to see this eye candy. Yes, the Web 2.0 faithful were well “Joost up” about the coming introduction of the live service, which van Gulik said would be “early this summer.” Meanwhile, if you’d like to try out the current beta client, go 
But I was able to bop right into one session before lunch: “Open Source Business Models for Web2.0.” John Roberts, CEO and cofounder of SugarCRM, told us about the non-traditional way his company started: really as a project, then it wasn’t incorporated for almost two years. Funding came even later. “Companies are starting differently these days,” he said. Now, SugarCRM has 100+ employees, 1200 customers in 30 countries, 100,000 users, and 7000 registered developers. How are they 2.0? “We sell subscriptions, not licenses,” he said. “And, as Tim O’Reilly would define it, we trust our users as co-developers.” 
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