By Michael Copeland

It’s not your 15-year-old daughter’s Internet anymore. On the first full day of the Web 2.0 Expo, that more than anything seemed to be the message from the conference room floor.

Tech stalwarts like Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT) were showing off technologies that bring elements of the consumer Internet to the workplace. Startups that last year might have been flogging a consumer video service or photo sharing site, instead were demonstrating web-based technologies to develop better Flash sites for business, a cheaper CRM software or an easier way to collaborate on projects. Dubbed Enterprise 2.0, the movement has been gathering steam for some time, but at the Web 2.0 Expo, business seems to have at last eclipsed the consumer Web.

The usual laptop-covered-in-stickers crowd was present as well, but for the most part this is not a gathering of people breathless over the latest Facebook app or keen on launching a widget that makes it easy to find where your favorite band is playing.

Part of that is by design: The companies that can afford to set up in the Expo hall are companies with money, like IBM, Microsoft, Adobe (ADBE) and others. But that itself is a sign of where Web 2.0 is heading. Last year, consumer Web companies had cash to burn. This year, many of the darlings of the social Web, startups that nailed funding at lofty valuations over the last 12 to 18 months, are holding onto what cash they have in anticipation of tougher times ahead.

It has been harder to monetize the social Web than many have thought, and buyers have become harder to come by, especially at the prices many Web2 companies thought they could command. As a result, companies are switching business models like spent horses. “People are realizing that advertising is not good for everything, that it’s not going to make them the next Google,” says Raju Vegesna, an engineer with online applications developer Zoho. “They are starting to get worried.”

Easy for Vegesna to say - Zoho is going directly after the business world, and makes money from subscriptions for its Web-based software. There is no question, though that smart entrepreneurs are starting to see things the way the Zoho team does, and creating applications and services that cater to business. That’s the good news for the corporate world. It’s about to get a slew of new tools that are informed by the best of the consumer world, but that pack the scaleability, security and customization that business users require. We’ll highlight the best over the next two days. It’s enough to make a 15-year-old girl jealous.

By Michael Copeland

On the eve of the latest and largest Internet gathering this year, O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Conference and Expo, Forrester Research dropped a report that concludes that companies will spend $4.6 billion on Web2-related technologies by 2013. What that means for you, fellow office dweller, is that Forrester believes the world of wikis, widgets, blogs, mashups and social networks will increasingly find a way into your work life.

The emphasis won’t be entirely on internal collaboration, Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young writes, but will also offer “a fundamentally new way to connect with customers and prospects…By 2013 investment in customer-facing Web 2.0 technology will dwarf spending on internal collaboration software by nearly a billion dollars.”

In other words, you will interact with your customers and prospects the same way you do with friends on Facebook or maybe more likely with colleagues on LinkedIn, and with the same Web-based communication and tracking tools.

It makes sense that companies embrace the same easy-to use Web-based tools that we use increasingly in our social lives. Mark Benioff at Salesforce.com has been preaching that for some time now, both through AppExchange and his latest brainchild Force.com, his so-called platform-as-a-service offering. There are numerous other Web-based services including Jigsaw, BaseCamp, Yahoo’s Zimbra, Zoho, and many others that are already bring a Web2 flavor to the work world. What Forrester is arguing, however, is that for everyone who still thinks AJAX is a cleaner, and Twitter is what birds do, a lot of Web2.0 will come.

Does that mean you will be getting Twitter updates from your customers or your boss? If not actual Twitter updates, than perhaps a more corporate version that can offer the same immediacy and easy access to a list of key people. Much of the consumer Web2.0 stuff that makes it fun won’t make the leap, no doubt, but the ease of use and connectivity will.

Will it be a less exciting and dynamic Web-based world that Forrester anticipates? Clearly. What it might also be, however, is a more profitable one. And that is something that many of the Web2 startups that are piling into San Francisco at the moment will be very happy to hear.

By Stephanie Mehta

In his first-ever keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show Tuesday, Comcast  CEO Brian Roberts seemed to be saying content is king. (Not what you’d expect from the nation’s largest distributor of pay television.)

Roberts, who was joined by radio personality and “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest for part of his speech, told the Las Vegas audience Comcast (CMCSA) is embarking on a strategy to make a vast library of professionally produced video content available through its “on demand” channel. “Project Infinity plans to give consumers the best and most content they will find on demand anywhere — more HD, more sports, more movies, kids’ programs and network TV,” Roberts said.

The announcement was a shot at satellite television operators DirecTV (DTV) and Echostar (SATS), which have been pledging to deliver 100 channels in high definition. (DirecTV says it now broadcasts some 85 national channels in high def.) Comcast doesn’t offer as many so-called “linear” channels in high-definition, so it isn’t surprising Roberts is touting new two-way technology that will enable it to deliver high-definition video programming on demand.

In addition, Roberts said the company was boosting its library of movies on demand (not necessarily all of them in HD).

Comcast also announced the launch of Fancast.com, a website aimed at helping consumers find, organize, view and even purchase video entertainment. The site is a sort of mash-up of entertainment database IMBD.com, online retailer Amazon, TVGuide and some of the fun, Web 2.0 apps one can find on Facebook.

One reason Roberts might be emphasizing content is because the distribution business is out of favor with investors right now. Comcast’s stock is trading near its 52-week lows, as are the stocks of Charter Communications (CHTR) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), which, like Fortune, is controlled by Time Warner (TWX).

In a recent interview, Roberts explained how cable can keep rivals from the satellite and phone businesses at bay. Content was the last thing he mentioned, but clearly programming is not an afterthought. “We have to innovate, have an open architecture and interoperate between cable companies, and our customer service has got to continue to reach new levels of excellence,” Roberts said. “We also have to have the most content, which we clearly do. Put together, we have a winning strategy.”

By Josh Quittner

Is Net-based TV ready for its close-up? Television ratings are already starting to plummet, the ongoing writers’ strike shows no signs of ending, and the development schedule for next year’s programming is looking increasingly dicey. While one report suggests that ex-TV watchers are turning to books and magazines, some folks in the nascent Internet TV business say they’re enjoying a sudden uptick in audience.

“We are seeing increased viewership at our top video products - Ask A Ninja, Boing Boing TV and Webb Alert, ” says Chas Edwards, publisher of Sausalito, CA.-based Federated Media, which sells advertising for Web sites. “But it’s hard to say how much is organic growth (the latter two both launched in the past six months) versus the migration of TV viewers to online video.”

The new TV properties are each already serving up around a million streams a month, he said; Ask A Ninja is doing closer to 3 million. Ads for premium video tend to fetch revenue of 2 to 4-cents a stream, notes Edwards, meaning that the hottest sites are starting to show quit-your-day-job-type returns.

Tech pundit and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, observing that television viewership “has been dropping as much as 10 percent a year over the last four years, especially among kids,” says that the writers’ strike simply adds fuel to the fire. “The Hollywood writer’s strike fiasco, which is just a huge mess, is killing an entire season of TV shows,” he says, “And quite possibly the next season as well. Which will drive even more people to the net, especially kids.”

Others agree. “We’ve definitely seen a marked increase in traffic over the past few weeks,” says Hayden Black, who produces the popular Net sitcoms, Goodnight Burbank and Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary. (Burbank is a fairly conventional, behind-the-scenes spoof of life at on a local TV news show; Abigail is a more cutting-edge comedy centered on Black, who plays a young girl afflicted with a fake disease that makes her look like a bearded, middle-aged man.) “Without any marketing at all, Abigail is doing about 10,000 streams a day,” Black says. The program, which launched two months ago, is now generating as much traffic as Burbank, which is a year old. Black, 34, who worked for years in network television writing promos, says he plans to keep his day job for now.

Edwards says that, while the near-term effect of the writers’ strike is hard to parse, he believes that in the coming months and years, Net TV will pay off - mainly because advertising dollars will increasingly flow there.

“Premium online video has always sold well,” he says. “Big brand advertisers for years haven’t been able to find enough video inventory that they consider ‘quality.’ I do think stumbling TV ratings (both from the Tivo effect and from the writers’ strike) will drive more video ad dollars online - it literally has to. Ratings that drop fast mean networks are giving advertisers part of their money back, and digital will benefit.”

He believes that much of the new media windfall will go—where else?—to Google. “The big digital video plays will win biggest: YouTube offers huge scale fast, they have moderately believable technologies to filter for scary content, and it’s becoming more than acceptable for brand advertisers to tell their bosses they bought YouTube.”

On Wednesday, Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick weighed in on the latest controversy surrounding Facebook and its new advertising system. While some critics in the media say the social networking site is doomed based on its own mistakes, Kirkpatrick argues that the site will not only survive concerns about violations of members’ privacy, but will continue to thrive. What do you think? Are you a Facebook fan or foe?

From Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick:

“The press rarely grants an autumn reprise for those it loved in the spring,” once wrote the great New York Times columnist Russell Baker. How true in the case of Internet-darling-turned-reviled-evildoer Facebook.

Facebook, the popular social networking site, has ridden the hype curve up and down in recent months, reaching a low Tuesday over claims that a month-old advertising system violates members’ privacy. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a big step Wednesday toward silencing naysayers - one of whom was my own colleague Josh Quittner - when he issued a contrite apology and made a key change to the new advertising feature, dubbed Beacon.

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature,” acknowledged Zuckerberg, “but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”

A little history: When Facebook, the popular social networking site, announced its strategy to host applications created by outsiders in May, the world and the press was dazzled - none more than me. Facebook found itself on the covers of magazines and the lips of Silicon Valley.

Then, in October, Microsoft (MSFT) bested Google (GOOG), winning the right to invest $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook and a new contract to display ads on the site. The deal valued Facebook at $15 billion. Meanwhile, the number of active members, 24 million in May, has soared to 57 million. Suddenly, Facebook was king of the hill.

Aiming to capitalize on its newfound acclaim and scale, Facebook announced its bold new advertising strategy in November. But Zuckerberg made a few strategic errors. First, he showed a touch of hubris when he intoned portentously to ad executives in New York during the announcement: “Once every 100 years, the way that media works fundamentally changes.”

Much worse, one part of the new Beacon ad system had not been fully thought through. It automatically alerts a member’s friends when she buys a new product or rents a movie. But the features intended to allow the member to control this alert system were hard to find and insufficient.

Journalists dug up unfortunate cases, like the wife who was automatically informed by Facebook of the ring her husband bought her as a Christmas present. Consumer and privacy watchdog groups began darkly criticizing Facebook’s “disregard” for members’ privacy. Meanwhile, a group called “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” has 68,000 members, which isn’t much for a service with 57 million users but enough to send a clear signal that people are upset.

The blogosphere - and in its wake, much of the mainstream press - went wild with derision. Here was Baker’s maxim come to life. We built them up and now we were going to bring them down.

Though Facebook has progressively taken measures to address the problems, the 23 year-old Zuckerberg until now had said nothing about the latest brouhaha. He broke his silence Wednesday with an apology to members and a fresh promise not to broadcast a member’s buying habits without her explicit approval. In a key move, he also allowed members to turn off Beacon.

Still, questions linger, including how much member information is pinging around the Net without permission or knowledge. If Zuckerberg stays attuned to these and any other ongoing concerns, the controversy will go away and Facebook will be as strong as ever. After all, that’s what happened when he wrote a letter of apology last year after a much bigger on-service protest erupted over a new Facebook feature that tells friends what other friends are doing on the site.

At first, the outcry over the Newsfeed feature was fierce. But then Facebook tweaked the feature, Zuckerberg apologized, and protesters realized they were making much ado about nothing. Newsfeed became one of Facebook’s most popular features. It’s also become part of the essential infrastructure for the viral dissemination of third-party Facebook applications created since May.

Until now, Zuckerberg’s silence has fueled press anger over Beacon and Zuckerberg’s apparent rigidity, including from my Fortune colleague, Josh Quittner, who argues Facebook may be dead.

Facebook is not anywhere near dead - and there’s zero chance it will be anytime soon, no matter how boneheaded some of its recent actions may have been. It would be virtually impossible for a new, as-yet-unheard-of service to come along and quickly steal Facebook users.

For all Facebook’s own successes, former social networking superstar MySpace, now owned by News Corp. (NWS), remains larger than ever by most measures. It takes a lot of work for a member to create a useful Facebook (or MySpace) network. They won’t flee lightly.

And while Zuckerberg may not have listened to them until now, Facebook has several “old hands” in the management suite to help guide the young company. Chief operating officer Owen Van Natta and privacy boss Chris Kelly are both in their late 30s. Chief financial officer Gideon Yu is 36 years-old and Vice President for Sales Mike Murphy is 45. All are industry veterans.

Facebook remains a seminal part of today’s technology landscape. It’s changing the way many people around the world use the Internet. For me personally, it’s the first Web service to come along in a decade since MyYahoo where I routinely spend at least half an hour daily.

Josh ends his post by saying, “Facebook has turned all the people who rooted for it into a lynch mob. In the space of a month, it’s gone from media darling to devil.” He’s right about that. But it may say more about the press - and today’s blog-led penchant for sensationalism - than it does about Facebook

By Josh Quittner

One of the rallying cries of the Web 2.0 movement, during its sensational rise over the past five years, is openness. Open systems (Linux, Wikipedia, any phone you can hack from T-Mobile) are good. Closed systems (Windows, The Wall Street Journal Online, any locked-down cell phone you buy from Verizon) are bad.

The basic idea is that the Web itself, that Shiva of the business world, is built on HTML and Javascript — code that’s as open and free from any one company’s control as, say, the United Nations. Smart companies are Zen-like: They give away the store and yet manage to make fortunes. Google, (GOOG) which opens up everything from its data streams (Google Maps, for instance) to the bidding process for advertising keywords is the typical example. Google is Web 2.0 and Yahoo, which has had a tortured time trying to accommodate itself to the new social web, is considered very Web 1.0 — and on the ropes because of it.

Amazon.com has always embraced openness. Launched in 1994, it’s a classic Web 1.0 company by definition. And yet it’s also at the forefront of the social web. It allowed its customers to write reviews of products before anyone else, its enormous affiliate program lets everyone sell its products and it was among the first to make its APIs (application programming interfaces) available to developers.

So it was fun, therefore, to watch some of the smartest Web 2.0 thinkers make sense of Amazon’s (AMZN) move to a closed, proprietary world last week with the launch of its e-book reader, Kindle. This was a rollout that, on first blush anyway, made the Microsoft Zune look downright innovative in its openness. (At least you can play MP3s on the Zune. For free.)

What’s going on here?

Here’s my guess: Emboldened by Apple’s (AAPL) success, some of the most innovative companies in the tech world are starting to shift back toward closed systems.

Apple, of course, is about as closed a company as we’ve ever seen. It is what makes the company great and what makes it a horror show. It’s why people love and hate it. On the one hand, Apple products are typically so far beyond those of the competition, a visitor from another planet might think that the former is made by humans and the latter by monkeys. (A techie pal, upon picking up his new iPhone some months ago, waved it at me and gushed, “This is like something from the distant future.”) On the other hand, virtually nothing about Apple is transparent and open, from it’s ghastly press relations to the way it handles customer complaints. The recent incident with the tech pundit Robert Scoble is a great example. He downloaded an Apple update to OS 10.4 and couldn’t restart his computer. I had exactly the same problem when I updated my laptop last week. So did many, many other people, judging from the thousands of views at the relevant area of Apple’s own support site. Yet, talk to Apple support and they deny there’s even a problem. It’s about as open as North Korea.

And yet, its success speaks volumes. The stock is up over 100% during the past 52 weeks. The company maintains such tight control over the products it sells you that you aren’t even allowed to use them in unauthorized ways. Remember the whole episode when some people tried to unlock their phones, Apple updated its software and bricked the rebel phones? Talk about closed systems…

Steve Jobs has become something of the alpha pack leader of the CEOs in Techland. While many people point to the similarities between Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates — affluent suburbanites, both dropped out of Harvard to pursue their big-picture tech dreams — its clear that Zuck’s role model is Jobs. (Zuck uses a Mac, dresses in his own Jobsian uniform, and tends to make grandiose statements about launching movements whenever Facebook holds an event.) While Zuckerberg’s most famous move was opening up Facebook to developers (”Today, we’re starting a movement…”) so far, he’s resisting Google’s call to create a truly open platform. Developers writing applications for Facebook must use its own proprietary language, called FBML. Google, and the rest of the OpenSocial alliance of competing social networks, use HTML and Javascript.

And really, why should he? Just because it’s open?

Apple is successful because Apple is Jobs. And Jobs believes in an almost pathological control. That is, after all, how a visionary gets results.

Will that work for Amazon and Facebook?

In Amazon’s case, if Kindle flames out, it’s not a big deal. The project is an ambitious experiment, and as Tim O’Reilly points out, even if the device itself fails, Bezos could well have jump started an industry that Amazon, with its enormous collection of e-books, is perfectly positioned to dominate.

Facebook, though, is at a more critical juncture. If it stays closed and starts to stultify as a result, members could easily pack up their tents and move to the next big thing. But if it manages to fight off OpenSocial? Look for more closed systems.

By Lindsay Blakely

Americans’ credit card debt is expected to reach a staggering $780 billion this year, according to Equifax and Moody’s economy.com. And that doesn’t even include the unpaid bills accumulating on department store charge cards. What’s bad for our bank accounts is turning out to be a wealth of opportunity for a slew of startup companies looking to help you manage your finances.

With names like Wesabe and Banzai, these Web 2.0 companies are trying to outdo one another by offering easy-to-use online tools that enable consumers to reign in spending and stick to a budget. Here’s how they measure up.

Wesabe

Wesabe bills itself as part financial software, part community. The site will keep track of your transactions automatically and uploading your accounts takes about just a few minutes. To make full use of the features, you have to rename and tag each purchase or deposit. The tags help categorize spending so you know where most of your money is going and they also serves as keywords Wesabe uses to generate spending and saving tips based on your habits. For example, if you’re in the red and you make a daily trip to Starbucks for a $4 latte, chances are one of your tips will advise you to cut out the caffeine addiction. The community part of Wesabe means you can join a support group to help reach a savings goal or ask other members questions like how to financially manage retirement.

Cost: Free

Pros: Transactions are automatically tracked; helpful charts monitor spending and earnings on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis; Wesabe is also available as a Mac Dashboard widget.

Cons: The “Tips” feature is not as personalized as it seems — tagging a transaction as “credit card payment,” for example, led to a tip about where to find the lowest calling card rates to India.

Banzai

If you’re looking for the lazy man’s approach to balancing your checkbook, this is not it. Banzai is designed around the theory that you can’t have your finances on auto pilot if you want to eliminate debt and increase savings. As such, even though you can upload account information from your bank each day, Banzai suggests spending the time to manually upload all transactions. “The Banzai Way,” as the company calls it, is to separate bills and expenses into “jars” so that you know how you’re allocating your money and can readjust to make sure you always have some cash in a “reserves” jar. As the only for-fee service, Banzai also matches you to a human coach for one-on-one budgetary assistance.

Cost: $4.95 a month

Pros: Clean, customizable interface; Banzai offers a whole philosophy and support manual to help people control their spending habits.
Cons: Just take a look at the extensive tutorial and lengthy FAQs and it’s clear that “The Banzai Way” requires a learning curve; your Banzai coach is not necessarily a financial expert — she is just another Banzai user. (Coaches do not have access to your account information.)

Mint

Mint is the opposite of Banzai in terms of effort required. You provide your bank and credit card account login information and Mint will automatically extract your transactions. The site’s technology will also categorize each expense or deposit for you and update your financial history daily. Other tools include “Spending Trends,” a tab that details monthly expenses by categories like entertainment and gas and shows the results in bar graphs; automatic budgets; and suggestions for other bank and credit accounts that could save you money.

Cost: Free

Pros: Easy to use; multiple ways to drill down into your finances in detail with graphs, charts and spending averages calculated for you; e-mail alerts let you know if your account balances are low.

Cons: The site is laden with details and suffers from information overload; although the automatic categorizing feature is usually on target, you may need to occasionally edit transaction labels for accuracy.

Expensr

Like Banzai, Expensr is mostly manual, unless you want to upload transaction files from your bank or credit card website. The company’s tagline is, “Where did all my money go?,” and to answer that question Expensr will organize your spending habits by category in a pie chart or show you a bar graph timeline. The site also lets you create multiple budgets where you can compare actual expenditures next to your budget goals. Under the community tab, you can fill out your profile, upload a photo and search for like-minded individuals using tags like “married,” “Canadian” and “in my twenties.”

Cost: Free

Pros: Easy-to-use budget tool; the milestone countdown is useful for tracking savings goals or dwindling check accounts.

Cons: Entering and categorizing transactions is a time-consuming process; social networking profiles are a great feature — but not on a personal finance website.