Web 2.0 Summit: The players and the products

The Web 2.0 Conference/Summit gets underway today in San Francisco, and I will be posting from there. John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly are hosting the pricey invitation only event, which will feature interviews with some of the high and mighty players in the Web 2.0 kingdom, such as Marc Benioff (salesforce.com), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Vint Cerf (Google), Bruce Chizen (Adobe), Barry Diller (IAC), David Filo (Yahoo), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Ross Levinsohn (Fox), Jonathan Miller (AOL), Ray Ozzie (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (New York Times), Niklas Zennstrom (Skype) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook).

Several products that demonstrate the latest goodness in Web 2.0 launched today. CNET's new Webware blog hosted by Rafe Needleman covering Web 2.0 products just launched and has posts on some of the featured products, including 3B, Turn and Adify. TechCrunch also will have its usual coverage of the latest Web 2.0 products.

For a refresher on what is Web 2.0, check out O'Reilly's treatise from a year ago. In that definitional work, O'Reilly described the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
  

At the end of the conference, we'll see if those items have change, and an attempt to define Web 3.0, which should be interesting...

Stay tuned for more coverage this week.