After Demo 2006 thoughts ...

I haven't been to Demo this year, but I’ve looked at some presentation videos. It occurred to me that that for a normal person, who doesn't  live all day long in Web 2.0,  the new services  of the last year or so all sound more alike than they really are.   Perhaps it's because many of them have: 

1)  " Exotic"  names  like Kaboodle or Zingee  - cool names, but they make it hard to remember which of them does what.

2)   Three  or four word "action message"  on the home page   - "Keep, Share, Discover" (del.icio.us); "Collect, Share, Discover" (Kaboodle) ; "Collect, Share, Connect" (Plum).

3)  Blurb that  sometimes seems to address the industry rather  than the user  - "Building the Social Web" ; "Powerful Web 2.0 Tools" ; "AJAX".

I searched for posts that had noticed these trends but couldn’t find any.

And re. Demo: there were some great companies. My favorite consumer product was Blurb. They're unique, they have a lot of technological depth, and their product fills a real need. For some things, the value of having a hard copy has no  substitute yet … at least for me .