In April, I have reported from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Now, the bandwaggon has moved to Berlin. Web 2.0 Expo Berlin is a good mixture of international panellists, although the organization of he conference sucks a bit (compared to San Francisco). Another difference: in San Francisco, there were a significant higher proportion of female visitors than here which gives me the impresion that in Europe Web 2.0 is still largely a male domain - one of the strengths of the US industry.

A quick scan at both meetings: The majority of Web 2.0 folks use Apple computers.

I was happy to meet Stowe Boyd again who is one of the most knowlegeable experts on social commmunities and social media on the web. He predicts that the future of social media is yet to come.

Remember e-mail. E-mails revolutionized the business world - the way we communicate, the way close deals, the way we work on joint products, etc. There were early adopters, and a broad mass who started to use e-mail at the second half of the 1990ies. Now, only very few people in business (at least if we talk about a certain business size) refuse to use e-mail.

However, this is not the case in the younger generation. Stowe says that our kids' generation consider e-mail as formal, sometimes even as evil. It is not their way to communicate. Younger people use other media to communicate and connect. These are mainly short messaging and messages delivered through and stored in social platforms (such as Facebok, Twitter, MySpace, etc.).

Email has tremendous disadvantages, the main being that they consume 10-20% of our productive time. They are not discriminatory, i.e. all kind of messages are delivered - love declarations (which should be delievered in person or at least through the phone), invitations for lunch (which should be rather a subject of short messaging), emails containing large files (which should be on a file sharing platform), network discussions (which should be in a forum or similar platform), personal stories (which should be in a blog or in a Wiki). How long will it take until we adopt multiple web skills, and reduce e-mails to the minimum. Thinking of it, I can not identify any justification to use e-mails in the future - for each purpose, there are much better technologies, which - and that is the major advantage can be kept spam free be simple means.

I will continue to report...