Just returned from San Francisco where I and some of my colleagues from AOL attended the 2006 Future of Web Applications. Also picked up a wicked cold while I was there. I think I was under-dressed for the SF Giants game on Wednesday night and it was cold and breezy. Anyway, Interestingly enough even though AOL was a sponsor and its logo can be seen on the Summit agenda, references to AOL from the scheduled speakers was basically non-existent. There were some negative references to the bruhaha related to the release of Search query logs and references to the small time pissing contest going on between the new Netscape site and Digg. The issue centers around the fact Netscape communicated that it is “paying” high profile prolific users.

What is interesting to me is that there were not only speakers from Yahoo and Google which are behemoths probably of the same size as AOL but that the other speakers from much smaller companies made many passing references to Google and Yahoo and from time to time Microsoft. Some of the references were joking in nature at the expense of the larger company nevertheless there were plenty of favorable mentions of work in the Web 2.0 space by those large companies.

Therefore it is not company size that contributes to the lack of respect AOL garners in the space. The community of Web geeks gets off on cool things or what it considers cool such as Zonetags from Yahoo that allow for submissions from a cell phone to be tagged with the location coordinates. Though this is in research mode, the presentation from Mor Naaman, Research Scientist from Yahoo! Research in Berkeley was well received. Furthermore it tied in nicely with Flickr’s presentation about the new geo tagging of photos and the fact that over 5 million photos have already been mapped to lat/long coordinates. Though Flick uses a different technology then that presented by Mr Naaman, it clearly presented an apparently coordinated approach by Yahoo to make it easy for users to geocode submissions on Web Sites.

I am sure there could/would be a debate about the relative merits of being considered “hip” by the Web 2.0 Intelligentsia. I opine it does matter and is helpful for various reasons not the least of which is as a recrutiting tool for Web technologists which Google , Yahoo and some of our other competitors make maximum use.

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