Geek Summit, Social Media Style

In a flurry of panels, one-on-one dialogues, product promos and surprise guests, the three day Web 2.0 Summit just held in San Francisco felt a bit like speed dating for tech companies:

"Hi, my name's HP and I'm eco-friendly. What's your sign?"
"Nice to meet you. I'm Google, and I can search your shared social media and make sure you're not too creepy."
"I'm MySpace. I'm a sensitive artist. Wanna come over and see my etchings?"

Bringing together Silicon Valley execs, media moguls, content producers and techie elite in one place wasn't an easy feat, but O'Reilly Media and TechWeb did a bang-up job, overflowing the ballroom at The Westin San Francisco Market Street.

Not afraid to bring out a little tension from high stakes competitors in the growing new media marketplace, John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly asked some sharp and intriguing questions of the speakers, enticing a Battle of the Bands style presentation as many presenters made major product announcements during the conference, including large screen demos and glossy booths. Wednesday's sponsoring headliner was Microsoft, introducing Bing's Twitter search, just before Google's encore performance announcing a Twitter deal and their upcoming Social Search.

The metropolitan crowd came laptops in-hand and left with plenty of exciting new ideas to take home and prepare for the next new new thing, but the waves rippling across the twitterverse will continue. Meanwhile, check out John Battelle's conference play list.

(Reposted from my column at SFGate.com.)