Web Company Launches at Light Speed During Web 2.0 Conference

There's one thing nearly all of the presentations being made at this week's Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco have in common: brevity. In that spirit, here's a quick look at eight of the new Web companies that debuted during Wednesday afternoon's 90-minute Launching Pad session. (Note: Not all of them are brand-spanking new, but they still have that new-Web smell.)

The Socialtext collaboration service claims to make organizing any group of people--from entire enterprises to fantasy football leagues--quick and simple. The company's Kwiki open-source wiki is based on a plug-in architecture that lets you add only the collaboration components you need.

One high-speed demo that had the audience of Web professionals gaping was the Rollyo personal search engine that you can use share groupings of your favorite searchable sites with others. As a f'rinstance, actress Debra Messing has combined her favorite shopping sites. According to founder Dave Pell, "Yahoo provides the engine, we provide the steering wheel."

The Joyent collaboration service is intended for workgroups looking to connect with clients, customers, and each other over the Web. The company will host the applications (which include e-mail, contacts, calendars, file sharing, and word processing) on its servers, or sell them on a server (server prices start at about $5000).

Imagine if you could hover over a time and date or the words "today" or "last week" in an e-mail message and get a mini view of your calendar for that time? The AJAX-based Zimbra collaboration suite lets you do just that. Currently in beta, this open-source e-mail fixer had the techies in the room drooling all over their laptops.

If you think your RSS feeds aren't getting to you fast enough, sign up for KnowNow's ELerts service (free for personal use) that adds a toolbar to Internet Explorer. Drag any RSS or Atom feed to the toolbar, and whenever new content is added to the feed, an alert appears.

Another service just getting off the ground is Wink, which attempts to combine social networks with tags to help people search for information and other resources on sites that their friends and acquaintences have tagged as useful. The service is currently in "private beta," so you'll have to ask for permission to register.

What the world needs is another browser. Flock uses the Mozilla browser engine but emphasizes connecting with people rather than simply with Web sites. The browser, which is expected to debut in "a few weeks," integrates a blog editor, a Flickr link, and sharable favorites/bookmarks, among other socialized features. Warning: there's not much to see on the Flock.com site at present.

The next big thing in search is peering into the future. That's what the PubSub service claims to let you do. The free service sends you an alert whenever new content matching your "subscription query" becomes available. PubSub claims to run 16 million blogs and 50,000 newsgroups, with more "streams" planned for the future.

Do any of these new services sound like winners to you?