The sold-out Web 2.0 Internet conference in San Francisco was buzzing again Thursday -- with people, with excitement, with an eagerness not seen since the days of the dot-com boom.
The consensus was, the more the Web site of the future allows people to share information with each other, the better.
Users can write reviews on the places they visit and easily upload photos of their stays, which are inserted into a Google map and ranked and ordered by subject.
The result: Other people can find out more about more places in more timely ways.
In fact, old-style Web sites that don't allow people to talk back -- and to each other -- are not going to do well in the new Internet age, speakers said.
``There's an architectural shift,'' said Keith Teare, general partner at Archimedes Ventures, of Palo Alto, and co-author of TechCrunch, a tech news Web site.
Still, if the technology was of the future, the conference atmosphere was something from the past.
The crowd was bubbly, with 800 attendees, up from 600 last year.
And many of Silicon Valley's most accomplished serial entrepreneurs were seen prowling the halls -- including Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and music file-sharing company Napster's co-founder, Shawn Fanning.
Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel, one of the speakers, belittled rival Google's recent efforts to expand beyond its leading Internet search engine, describing the diversification as a haphazard attempt to catch up with his company.
Semel did say Google was a pioneer in online search, but added that it seemed to be following in Yahoo's footsteps by adding new products such as e-mail, photo sharing, social networking, personalized home pages and voice communications.
The additional features, Semel said, have made Google ``look more and more like a portal.