SAN FRANCISCO—In front of a conference room packed with more than 300 Web 2.0 conference attendees, search analyst and tech guru John Battelle raised his voice.

"Settle down, people, we've got 12 companies to launch in the next 90 minutes."

The principals and representatives of those 12 companies sat behind a table draped in wires, laptops, switchview controllers and monitors. "And, of course," Battelle said, looking at the mess, "they all want to use their own laptop."

As the chuckles from the crowd subsided, Battelle announced that each company would have exactly 6 minutes to show their product to the attendees. Some products, such as Rollyo's custom search engines, were already familiar, having debuted (on the Web at least) a few days prior. Other products, like Zimbra, showcased features for the first time.

Web 2.0 trends? Tagging is replacing folders. AJAX and Flash are competing for interface space. Companies are placing their trust in user-generated content and transparent communication and collaboration. As for search, it looks like we're stepping away from the Google/Yahoo/MSN/Technorati paradigm of one-size-fits-all and heading toward specialized queries. Finally, events and event search is big and is only going to get bigger.

Below is a recap of what launched here:

SocialText
SocialText is a wiki product for enterprises. CEO Ross Mayfield reminded the crowd that 30 percent of e-mail is group e-mail. He believes such conversation is moving to wikis. (According to its front page, one of SocialText's customers is Ziff Davis Media.) Beyond the wiki idea, which is a few years old itself, I don't see much new here. But the company has several high-profile board members, including Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and tech guru Joi Ito. Perhaps their guidance will help SocialText revolutionize the concept of intranets.

Rollyo
Rollyo debuted on the Web last Monday, but founder Dave Pell was here to show off its simple but impressive features. "The idea is you can go in and create a search engine that brings results only from sites you're interested in," said Pell. "The other part is you can find other searches. … The idea is, you give up nothing. Yahoo provides the engine, we provide the steering wheel."

Joyent
Dave Young demonstrated this Web app, which rolls e-mail, calendaring and file sharing into one. Joyent makes prevalent use of tagging. Joyent's home page says the product is still in pre-beta, but look for this company to ride high on the wave of new Web-based office apps.

Bunchball
Bunchball is a platform for building and sharing social applications, including games (it's also a horrible name—was Atomic Wedgie their second choice?). It's a lot like Andreessen's Ning, but looks about a hundred times more friendly and easy to use. Founder Rajat Paharia spent too many minutes explaining why Bunchball would be successful, when all he needed to say was, "We're Ning done right." Bunchball is targeting Flash developers first. There seems to be a big battle coming up between apps that use Flash (Bunchball, Allurent) and those that are AJAX-esque (Zimbra). However, as Jesse James Garrett has noted, the two technologies can work together (MeasureMap, sIFR).

Realtravel
If there's a Web 2.0 app your mom will love, this is it. Founder Ken Leeder pitched Realtravel as "real travel reviews by real people talking about real things." Users can write reviews about where they've traveled, insert their photos, connect their destinations on an historical map (a Google mashup), and view other users' journals. All activity is tag-based, which allows for easy cross-referencing and enhances findability. Fun to look at, fun to use.

Zimbra
"We're here to announce that we're going to free you from your old proprietary e-mail applications," said Satish Dharmaraj, founder and CEO of Zimbra. And in truth, if there was one application that wowed everyone at the conference, it was Zimbra. It's hard to explain exactly how cool this app is. Perhaps the biggest feature is the existence of mashups inside e-mail. Dharmaraj showed an e-mail where every date, location and phone number was cross-referenced visually with the user's personal calendar, a Google map or Skype. "All these mashups," said Dharmaraj, "are about third-party calls to data that we don't control."

Zvents
This Web app is an events search tool that combines an intuitive calendar view and Google maps to show you what's happening near you. The interface is three simple "what, where, when" text entry boxes. There's a lot of movement in this space, especially considering Yahoo's recent acquisition of Upcoming.org and all the talk at the conference about the hreview standard and event tagging. If Zvents taps into this zeitgeist, it'll be successful.

KnowNow
KnowNow mastered viral marketing at the Launch Pad by continually popping up during every other company's presentation. The app is a toolbar that notifies you when sites you're interested update. Y'know that little pop-up window that tells you when an IM buddy comes back online? Yeah, it's that annoying. But it's also a great technology, if you want to add another toolbar to your browser.

Orb
Orb lets you access your media from any device that connects to the Internet. I was surprised, and it seemed most of the audience was surprised, when the app actually worked. Founder Ian McCarthy also used Orb during the session to cut the lights in one of his co-worker's apartments.

Wink
Another search engine. This one seemed to be akin to the job search engine Indeed, in that it allows a user to rate search results and block those results that aren't relevant.

AllPeers
AllPeers is another platform (and a good one) for developing social networking applications. Its biggest weakness is that it relies on Firefox.

Flock
Flock, along with Zimbra, has owned much of the small-business buzz at Web 2.0. They haven't given the press an official tour of the product yet, but company reps said a beta should be available in two months. CEO Bart Decrem told me that Flock will see the Web "not as a big-ass library but as a string of events and peopled interactions." The product looks great. Too bad Decrem let his tween-age developers mumble through much of the presentation.

PubSub
PubSub reps say the app lets you search the future by comparing your news requests to new information. They announced the funding of an open-source development effort to deploy plug-ins for Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal and other blogging platforms.

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