Web 2.0 Expo Boring

I was very disappointed in the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday at Moscone Center in SF. I wasn’t expecting much since everything I was interested in was part of the conference and not the expo, but I thought it would at least be fun and interesting. It was not.

I was glad I left late for the city. I stayed home in the morning to work on the big site upgrade that I am doing. I reached about hour 25 of what will most likely be a 30 hour project that I will get paid $300 for. I suppose $10/hr. is a big improvement over the $2/hr. I was making last year. I am happy about the job. It is for a long time client who has sent me many referrals, and the updated site will make it much more usable for us both.

I digress. Back to the expo. So many of the things that I consider to be the future (and present) of the web are open source projects with large enthusiastic development communities. The small expo floor was filled with large corporations and smaller startups focused on selling their products to other companies. The people I spoke with were sales reps rather than developers.

GoogleDoubleClickAmazonMicrosoftAOLeBayNokia. For sure these companies are contributing a lot to the current and future web, but I had expected a bunch of geeky web developers excited to learn about new technology, trade mashup ideas, or at least argue about which programming language is best. I think the conference might have been more like that, but the expo was for marketing, not learning. There were some interesting products there for sure, and if I was a big company with lots of money to spend, I may have been more interested in some of them.

Walking around and hearing sales pitches was boring me, and I am almost never bored. It only happens when I am in a place where I have no interest in what is going on around me and no freedom to retreat into my own brain. If I am in a situation like that for too long, I will end up in my own world anyway and start seeming retarded to anyone trying to interact with me because I can barely talk and I hear things too slowly to respond to them. It is also about the point where I start bumping into people because I lose track of what is going on outside of my head. Nice 😐 Luckily K was there! Somehow she manages to communicate with me no matter how slow my brain is at any given moment.

Thanks to K, the day was not a complete loss. She met me at Moscone Center and we walked around the expo together. That was nice. We entered some contests, K more than me because she had business cards with her and I didn’t. There was a contest to win a copy of Adobe CS Web Premium. We both entered. It would be great to win that! We got the obligatory pens, a bright orange t-shirt, and a tiny green stapler. After that, we had some dinner at the Metreon and then BARTed home. I was completely exhausted, but ended up working for a little while before finally getting to watch Jeopardy on DVR.

I have been very tired the past few days. Not sure if it is from working so much or meds, but I am still feeling much better than before. I don’t know if I will be able to go to Hannah’s birthday party or not, but I am finally starting to feel like traveling might not be a horrible nightmare, so hopefully I will get there at some point in the near future.

3 thoughts on “Web 2.0 Expo Boring”

  1. Yay, glad I could help sweetie 🙂 Also happy to hear you may be up for traveling again at some point – I miss my travel buddy 🙂

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  2. Aw shoot, I wish I’d known you were going to be at Moscone — it would have been nice to hang out with you for a while. Sounds like you had great company, though. 🙂

    Maybe next time you’re going to be in the city, if you’ve got a spare half hour or hour, we could meet up? I’m glad the new meds seem to be working much better for you!

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