Web 2.0: Where users are in charge

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Internet is increasingly controlled by its users, and not its designers.

That shift was evident Thursday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a three-day conference co-produced by Sebastopol-based O'Reilly Media.

Companies such as Facebook and MySpace are Internet royalty for recognizing early that people want places to socialize online, sharing everything from music and videos to recipes and opinions.

This evolution of the Internet toward an interactive medium has become known as Web 2.0, a term coined by O'Reilly Media in 2003 to describe the next phase of the Web.

Every day, 200,000 to 400,000 new accounts are created on MySpace, a 5-year-old social networking site that allows users to post their profiles and other personal information. The site now has 117 million users, with up to 5 million people using the site at any given moment.

"The most vibrant online communities are those that allow for self determination and self organization," said Steve Pearman, MySpace's senior vice president of strategy.

Rumors and speculation about Microsoft's ongoing attempt to buy Yahoo circulated throughout the conference. In the midst of that, Ari Balogh, Yahoo's chief technology officer took the stage to announce a new Web 2.0 strategy.

"We are literally in the process of re-wiring Yahoo from the inside out," he said. "We will open up the assets of Yahoo to developers, and we are going to make the Yahoo experience social throughout."

As a first step, he announced that a new product, Search Monkey, was available in beta for developers to design new ways to display and sort Yahoo search results. Search Monkey will allow third-party developers to mesh together search results from Yahoo with content from other sites, such as user reviews from Yelp.com, he said.

Internet pioneer Marc Andreesen, the co-designer of the first widely used Web browser, urged entrepreneurs at the conference to stick with their projects. He reminded them the computer was once considered nothing more than a toy, and Internet browsers were once considered fads.

"Now you have a whole generation of kids that are communicating through the browser," Andreesen said.

He developed the browser Mosaic in 1993. It later became Netscape, which helped spawn the Mozilla Foundation that makes the widely praised browser Firefox, which is free to download online.

"It turns out that the Internet has turned out pretty well," he said.

The three-day expo is a mixing bowl of sorts, with the Internet's royalty announcing new products and strategies, upstart entrepreneurs displaying their latest online developments and venture capitalists on the lookout for the next big thing.

Dozens of bloggers and journalists hurried about trying to get the latest scoop from the more than 8,500 people expected to attend.

Like many aspiring Internet entrepreneurs, Sara Margulis attended the expo in hopes of learning how to equip her Web site with the latest online technology. She started www.honeyfund.com in Santa Rosa with her husband in 2006. Her Web site has about 5,000 active users.

"We're looking to incorporate more Web 2.0 features, like social networking and peer reviews into our Web site," she said. "We want our Web site to not only be a free place for honeymoon registry, but also a place brides go to share their experiences and review travel agents and trips."

You can reach Staff Writer Nathan Halverson at 521-5494 or nathan.halverson@

pressdemocrat.com.