I'm not there, but everyone else seems to be.
Search Engine Watch has a nice rundown of some of the coverage of the big interviews from the Web 2.0 Summit:
What have we got? YouTube's growth made it a necessary purchase. No, money's not set aside to cover YouTube legal claims. Yes, you can have your data if you want it, users. No, Google's not trying to take out Microsoft Office.
One very interesting tidbit from Google CEO Eric Schmidt's interview with John “Searchblog” Battelle was noted by Dan “Between the Lines” Farber:
“We build a very good targeting engine and a lot of business success has come from that. We run the company around the users–so as long as we are respecting the rights of end users and make sure we don’t do anything against their interest, we are fine,” Schmidt said. He noted that history has shown that the downfall of companies can be doing things for their own self interest. “We would never trap user data,” he said.
Schmidt was asked if users could get all of their search history and export it to Yahoo. “We would like to do that, as long as it is authenticated….If users can switch it keeps us honest.”
It's perhaps the best articulation yet of what “Don't be Evil” tangibly means to users and customers, and speaks directly to the idea that Tim O'Reilly's been trying to articulate around “open (source) data.” It becomes more and more important once the Google-envisioned era of searchable, shareable data in the cloud (presumably at least partly in the data centers they operate) becomes a more pervasive reality.
Unless, of course, it's just lip service, and trapping your creation, collaboration, and search history becomes the new vendor lock-in. But that would be pretty evil. So far, it looks like we can take Google at their word. They've been good at providing programmatic and/or otherwise standards-based access to the data in their services for individual users (think POP access to Gmail, or OPML export from Google Reader). Being able to take your personalized search history would be a bold move on their part, and one that might not make sense if it were undertake unilaterally (shouldn't Yahoo! and Microsoft reciprocate?), but it's heartening to hear Schmidt articulate the sentiment as clearly as he did.
Also in Danny “SearchEngineWatch” Sullivan's roundup: paidContent's @ Web 2.0: Day One Highlights: Ad 2.0; Google CEO; Skype Content, and Valleywag's Web 2.0 Con: Liveblogging the “Conversation with Eric Schmidt”
Tags: Google, evil, open data, Web 2.0 Summit