I’m back again at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for my third Web 2.0. It’s HUGE this year, which is good and bad I suppose. It’s harder to find my colleagues who were at this several years ago. I am not sure if it’s just the growth of tech again, or more bubblicious start up activity (need to look at the attendee list). Good lineup of speakers this year – it will be interesting to see Ballmer tomorrow morning. Here are some notes from the keynotes -I missed the early sessions:

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook – funny conversation with Battelle. He can definitely hold his own. Sounds like they have a big announcement that will happen within the next three months. They have about 300 people working there, likely growing to 700 in the next year. Not focused on IPO or acquisition, focused on growing. He described a “Social graph” – set of connections that everyone has in the world which has always existed. Facebook is trying to map it out and expose those connections as appropriate to applications. It’s not “Facebook’s” social graph…it’s the world’s social graph. They are just mapping it. He believes people learn most of what they know through their connections – shared values and concepts, and the bandwidth across those connections is great. It has decentralized how people get information. 20-30% of the audience at Web 2.0 developing on top of the Facebook platform. The ramp has been incredible – which surprises them. They seem to have a very long term view on the platform. Batelle hit him on the developers terms of service which gives FB the ability to cut a developer off at any moment. He said they put in some pretty broad restrictions because they weren’t sure what was going to crop up. Mentioned that they would likely be doing something in the ad space, but they are trying to keep a level playing field. Giving people tight control over their information on a really granular level is what makes the system work.

Marissa Mayer, Google – Speaking about Google Health. 66% of health information needs are directed at Search first (as opposed to direct to a web site). Massive amounts of data is what interests Google – medical records, xrays, etc… fit that bill. They will start with search (Google Co-op plays in here), local and maps to find doctors, personal health records – easy to digitize this data, sharing medical history with loved ones, storage and movement of medical information.

Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia – positioned the phone as a continuously connected computer. Ovi – services api’s based on the Nokia multimedia computers (Nokia N810) that developers can use. It’s interesting, I fundamentally agree with him when it comes to browsing, email, IM, etc… but office apps – can’t imagine doing our ops plan on any small form factor device. At least not with the technology we have today – I’m sure we’ll get there.

300K developers supported on the “maemo “platform – see the next generation of the web happening here. Combining the Navteq map information (their recent acquisition) with the platform, he sees the next generation of the web happening in the mobile space.

Bruce Chizen, Adobe – (disclaimer: I work for Adobe) Discussed Adobe as the enabler of images, graphics, video, workflows for the web. 70% of video on the web is Flash. If you want to create more than mediocre experiences, you need to use Adobe products. Tim brought up Virtual Ubiquity – the new Buzzword product, exciting because it’s a great AIR application, and because everyone understands the value of a word processor.

Mid-interview, Bruce’s mic went out – few random funny moments. Was wondering how they were going to share Tim’s mic…I was a bit surprised that they didn’t have a handheld mic up there on the set, but it was fixed fast enough.

Bruce did a great job of explaining what the AIR runtime is – the ability to take web-enabled apps to the desktop. He went into Adobe’s hosted-service strategy with Photoshop Express, Share, Buzzword and how it would probably be funded by advertising. Explained that we are very much in experimentation mode with the model right now. Most of the people who use Adobe’s imaging, video and workflow apps need good CPU horsepower, so the really heavy lifting will be done with desktop apps, but there are hybrid’s of these applications (ala Photoshop Express) that can bring flexibility to the workflow, sharing and implementation.

Silverlight – says MSFT is trying to imitate Flash and get the ecosystem, but they aren’t there yet (see the Microsoft Halo3 site, which is all Flash based, and beautifully done). The message is that web development is the locus for AIR, and your web development methods don’t have to change. For apps it’s revolutionary – for developers, it’s evolutionary.

Tim posed the question about how Adobe was going to compete if the new elements on the web are about access to people, social graphs, communications – and less about documents and objects. Bruce said Adobe remains relevant because they are about enabling communcations. The world is becoming more social, and people want to express themselves in a visual way. We’ll be adding VOIP, Connect API’s…Flash Player becomes a universal communications client. In 10 years Adobe’s products will be delivered via services.

Ted Leonsis – Revolution Money: Why do the credit card and interchange costs keep going up when telecom costs are going down? It’s a $60B marketplace. Ripe for a disruptive technology. Could you redirect the money to go back to consumers in some way? Safety, security, no fees when used online, flat-fee for card usage. New way of taking out the intermediary – PayPal meets MasterCard without the fees – RevolutionMoneyExchange.com. They have a bunch of companies that are integrating with their MoneyExchange. Could be a serious player – Leonsis is the real thing, he’s super smart and really understands consumers. This looks like it’s worth investigating.

Evan Williams – Twitter: an application framed around the question “What are you doing?” What they have learned: how applying constraints to your product/application can have unexpected benefits. Ask “What can you take away to create something new?” Really interesting concept that some companies get really well and some will never get! In many ways Twitter is a blogging app – without most of the blogging app features. But the basis was different – using SMS as a way to tell your friends what is going on. There are limitations – 140 characters, command-line based. But using SMS gave benefits – highly usable due to lower “cognitive load”. API program has been very successful, and today there are hundreds of Twitter-based apps.

He riffed for a while on typical online apps and how to cut them down, and started getting a bit tongue in cheek…for instance MySpace but just for college students, or Yahoo! without all the clutter – just a white page and a box. Point made. Really fun talk.

That’s all I captured today. Hope to make it up there in time to see Ballmer in the morning. It’s always interesting to see Microsoft execs in the middle of the Silicon Valley web crowd.