The San Francisco Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone West this week raised a number of questions around the state of Web 2.0, its multiple themes, and of course the trendlines of its Enterprise 2.0 spin offs. We were taking in the scene from the perspective of the expo floor at booth-level, the full general session presentations, and the tracked breakouts. A few thoughts from each follow.

This Web 2.0 really was an Expo, the first full-blown trade show O’Reilly and CMP have risked in the space. On the one hand, the bet seemed well-placed: the whisper number was 10,000 registrations; there were certainly 5,000+ souls on hand. Standing room was the order of the week. On the other, it continues to be clear that, as John Battelle put it, “Google is the oxygen,” a giant in a class by itself both in business terms and in terms of stimulating the imagination of a next cadre of entrepreneurs. Hype cycle aficionados take note.

Leaving for another time two big questions: whether one company can make a market, and whether Google can be thought of as a Web 2.0 business, it continues to be clear that search is inspiring all kinds of investors, entrepreneurs, and geeks to unearth ways to make finding stuff better on the web. Favorite niches of the moment include the very local, the very vertical, the very personal, the very social, the video in all flavors, and the mobile. Standing the booth immediately next to Google, it was clear that FAST was the only company on the floor to have innovations, technology, and customers in all those areas already in the market, and under one roof.

It’s also evident that there has been an interesting flip in investor community attitude for this 2.0 period. For the past decade and more, any new business plan required “the Microsoft story,” i.e. how will you compete when MS gets interested in your technology? No bulletproof story, no $$. In the 2.0 investment period, each new business plan appears to require “the Google story,” i.e. how can you put your business directly in the path of the Google acquisition machine?

The usual enterprise IT vendor suspects were again largely absent the Web 2.0 big tent. In the exception category, IBM gets credit for recently opening up and explicitly working the Enterprise 2.0 angle to revive their shrinking collaboration franchise. But special mention goes to Adobe and its new Apollo thick client offering, a potential breath of fresh air for user experience quality and clarity in a more flexible, mashup-oriented IT future.

Moving on to a few tidbits from the general sessions of the Expo conference. Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt were the 2 large type headliners. Amazon continues to push hard on the web developer services story, but the crowd was almost embarrassingly exposed to more conversation on Bezos’ own space exploration project and ongoing Amazon IP litigation issues than on the traction (or lack thereof) around web-centric developer services environments. Eric Schmidt, as the dust is only barely beginning to settle on the DoubleClick acquisition, was predictably insistent that GOOG is not a search company, but a media franchise for the future. At least Eric has the story crystal clear.

The Enterprise 2.0 feature keynote was to have highlighted Shai Agassi of SAP, champion of the Netweaver and web services story for enterprise applications, unplugged on E20. As luck would have it, Shai announced his resignation from SAP just a couple of weeks before show time >> ZD commentator Josh Greenbaum provides evergreen and well-positioned commentary here >>

The short-notice replacement panel included Ross Mayfield of SocialText, whose blog we read here, Google Enterprise’s Matt Glotzbach, and Satish Dharmaraj, of Zimbra, a SaaS collaboration play built on open source. The gist of this discussion centered on the idea that people inside businesses are going to use the tools they need to do the job, and that IT has a choice to be part of the solution or part of the problem. Like Yogi Berra, “if you come to a fork in the road, take it…”

Ross likes to make the point that the GenY or millennial generation of workers now filling up the ranks of enterprises will provide the push for Web 2.0 adoption with the observation that: “These are the people who did their homework on MySpace and it was called cheating. Now they come to work, do the same thing, and it’s called collaboration.”

Shifting to the bulk of the content side of the program, in the track sessions representation of enterprise issues predictably trailed community, media, user generation, and various programming model innovations by miles, but the push is clearly on for SaaS enterprise applications on the salesforce.com model, with multiple well-funded startups offering the latest interpretation of (dare we mention?) ASP offerings. The issues that brought the party to a close last time (circa 2001) have not changed dramatically, but at least in this setting, the moves MS, ORCL, IBM, and SAP are making to position their franchises for this space are not resonating.

What does seem to be resonating in the area of enterprise practice is Round 3 or so of search engine optimization and search marketing, which as the wellspring of the Google oxygen is still packing in the people who are seekers after the bottom line. For commentary here check out David Berkowitz’ blog. Again, it was clear that the current reconfiguration of big media’s ad strategies is very consistent with FAST’s experiences and new offerings around ad momentum globally.