To Web 2.0 Expo and back

The fire was there but the sparks were missing. Dont know why but this years Web 2.0 Expo seemed kinda low key to me. There were a number of companies out there showing off their wares but didnt really see the one or two or few killer applications, tools or products. The Microsoft Live Mesh announcement came close but didnt quite stand out as that spark.

The good thing was that almost all of the vendors out there were trying to position themselves as enterprise 2.0. Which means the guns are now trained on making it happen in the enterprise.

Walking around at Moscone I clubbed vendors in 4 main categories this year.

• PaaS vendors
  
• Vendors who'd squeezed Wiki, Blog, Forums, RSS, Chat into a suite that was enterprise friendly
• Vendors who provided specialized manpower with Web2.0 expertise.
  
• Everyone else mobile apps, voice enabled apps, vendors focused on individual components of category (2) above etc.
  

Its interesting how everyone's swarming to the PaaS space, so the webs been the platform for a while now and it seems like this might be the year when we go mainstream by sending the platform through the web.