Slide Show: The Future Is Now At The Web 2.0 Summit

More than 1,000 attendees jammed into San Francisco's Palace Hotel for last week's Web 2.0 Summit, overflowing corridors between sessions.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer began his onstage interview with show host John Battelle by saying it's impossible for him to pick out favorite Microsoft products -- they're all like his children. Battelle grabbed the simile later to needle Ballmer about Microsoft's lagging position in the search market, behind Google.

"How about search? Is it one of those kids you might privately smack on the side of the head and say, 'Do a better job, Jimmy?'" Battelle asked.

The query sent Ballmer on an extended, hyperanimated riff about how Microsoft search is like a three-year-old sent out to play basketball against teenagers, to whom Ballmer would say: "You're growing up quick, you're getting better every day, you've got all the potential in the world ... you're going to DUNK on these guys some day!"

Microsoft used the conference to showcase its social-media savvy, featured in a Popfly-built mashup of real-time postings from Twitter, Facebook, Technorati and Flickr.

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe joined MySpace owner/media overlord Rupert Murdoch for a talk about the site's future, including plans to challenge Facebook as a social-networking platform for outside applications development. DeWolfe waved off the idea that MySpace might buy up some of its Web 2.0 brethren, though: "These acquisitions are so expensive right now that it just doesn't make sense."

MySpace used the conference as a launching ground for its new San Francisco office, which it opened to staff up on Silicon Valley engineering talent.

Meg Whitman, eBay CEO, kept her Thursday morning keynote engagement despite eBay's rocky earnings announcement the night before, which featured the auctioneer's first loss since the late '90s. Whitman defiantly defended eBay's decision to buy Skype, a chunk of which it wrote off earlier this month. "In this business, the price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake," she commented.

Part of the Web 2.0 Summit's attendee schwag didn't fit in the conference bag -- organizers arranged to donate trees in Niger. By e-mail, attendees were invited to name their personal tree and sign up on Tree-Nation to bond with it.

As the Web 2.0 Summit wound down, San Francisco businesses geared up for their next big tech trade show.