The Google I/O event is coming up at the end of May here, and it's set to be a defining moment for a lot of Web 2.0, particularly the social web.  Just about every big name in the social networking world and at the OpenSocial side of things at Google is due to speak or be present during this event designed to educated and propagate further development on the OpenSocial platform.

Google Product Manager Tom Stockey stopped by at Mashable Conversations to give us a bit of insight as to not only who and what will be at Google I/O, but a bit of insight as to the guiding philosophies of those involved in the group.  It's a quick conversation, but one worth catching.

Break Media has been at the leading edge of online video entertainment in terms of both content development as well as monetization and producer rewards for a good while now - longer than a lot of the other players that see a lot of press in the Web 2.0 game. They're leading again, as last week they announced the formation of the Online Video Advertising ROI Council.

The council bears a lot of similarity to the organization the Association for Downloadable Media in scope and focus.  Just like the ADM, the ROI Council consists of a large variety of online media organizations, including Break Media, Ogilvy One, truTV, National Geographic Channel, AT&T,], eMarketer, Panache, Lotame, Visible Measures, Horizon Media, and Initiative Media.

I got to speak with Keith Richman, the CEO of Break.com, last week and speak frankly about the state of the business and where things are headed. While the business of online video remains very lucrative for a lucky few producers and a wonderfully successful place to put your advertising dollars, for the vast majority of producers and advertisers, it remains a very difficult minefield to navigate.

Keith and I talked not only about the goals and aim of the ROI council, but the state of the indie producers, and when we'll start to see that boom for them that bloggers see today.  For some, that boom is now, with some of the top paid producers on Break earning several thousand a month.

This is a very valuable chat to listen to, no matter which side of the online video production business you aim to be on.

 

Ever since Hi5's OpenSocial-compatible developer platform launched back in late March, usage and installs have been going on at a breakneck pace. As of the first week of April (one week into the existence of the platform), the developer platform was fully deployed, 100% OpenSocial compatible, and with over 150 apps developed and deployed. The number of installs on these applications, in many cases, far exceeded the number of installs on the top MySpace applications.

This rapid development and rapid adoption is largely due to the multi-national userbase of Hi5, and the strong sense of involvement and development community they've cultivated since the inception of the service.

I had a chance to grab some insight on how this social network has become a Web 2.0 success story from  Lou Moore and Anil Dharni, two developers at Hi5.

RightScale is an organization that's essentially positioned themselves as the intermediary between the sometimes confusing world of cloud-based server environments and the end user. I, myself, am completely fascinated with the cloud computing world, and I understand the basic principals as to how it's supposed to work.

In practice, though, I find setting up and operating most of the cloud server environments to be confusing and ultimately impossible for a life-long developer like myself (yes, I'm the type of developer all you admin types hate to have accessing your boxes - I know my way around the server just enough to muck it up so that you need to fix it at least once a week).

RightScale is an organization that sits between people like me and that confusing world - sure I understand how to use most of the server environments I can program in, but I'll stare over and over at the EC2 documentation and still not understand what it is I need to do to set up an account and get it running like I need it.  RightScale does this for dolts like myself, and acts as a sort of contract admin team to solve the unique sorts of issues that can arise in that environment.

Their organization just recently raked in $4.5 million from Benchmark Capital in a Series A funding round.  RightScale's CEO, Michael Crandell, came on Mashable Conversations to educate me on how their business worked and gave a good benefit and downside run-down on the prospect of moving your server's computing to the clouds.

I had a chance to speak to Chris Parandian briefly back in March when I was in Washington D.C. for our MashMeet and the Politics Online Conference.  Chris is the founder of Tin Can Communications, a public affairs and new media centric communications firm out of DC, as well as a blogger at the social media/mobile industry blog Mobile Diner.

Chris is in a unique position to really monitor the convergence of mobile and social media, a topic we revisit quite frequently here at Mashable Conversations.  Given our interest in the topic, Chris and I had a great time exploring the intracacies of where this space is going and not only why it's so hard for new entrants to break out in the mobile space, but given that difficulty how exactly we got to where we are today, so many miles from where the mobile industry was back a decade ago.

This was a truly engaging conversation, and we covered a mountain of material too deep to enumerate here - definitely worth taking the time to wade through the whole hour-long conversation.

...and I really only say that because FriendFeed is one of those rare services that has the ability to convey a strong sense of culture that's relevant to the user.  It doesn't try to pollute it or dilute it or otherwise overpower it with a corporate branding effort like, say, Facebook.  When you're logged into FriendFeed and have a group of folks with which you're familiar with added to your circle, you can't help but feel a little like you're home.

DeviantArt portrays the same sort of feeling of community and strong culture, without being overbearing  in nature. DeviantArt has been around a whole lot longer than FriendFeed, of course, and has had time to cultivate it's very strong community (back when they still called them communities, instead of social networks); I've been a member of the service since 2003, myself.

I recently had a chance to sit down and talk about the history of DeviantArt with one of it's founders, still active in the company, Angelo Sotira.Given the fact that despite having an immense userbase that's been creating tens of millions of art pieces for the last eight years, they've recieved surprisingly little press. Angelo and I discussed why that is (hint: it's by design), a little bit of their history, and perhaps most interestingly how their culture has adapted to the new popularity of Web 2.0 and social media.

Jangl is one of those companies that provides a utilitarian service that you may easily overlook, despite the fact that they're absolutely everywhere. You can't hit up a single major social networking site out there without eventually running into their application - they're on Bebo, Match.com, Plentyoffish, MySpace, Facebook and Tagged, just to list a few.

Despite the fact that Jangl's been out there forever, and received exactly three metric tons of blog coverage, they're still one of those companies that not everyone knows exactly what they do. They're essentially a convergence provider, allowing two way mobile access to social network messaging by utilizing VoIP technology. In English, that means they use the various development platforms on social networks to deliver messages from people's voices to your inbox.

I recently had the chance to sit down with one of Jangl's founders, Michael Cerda, and we talked about the rise of his company, the very interesting funding and founding process they went through, and exactly what has fueled the growth of his organization.

An interesting tidbit I found out from the conversation was the the founders of Jangl are not just bussiness partners, but also bandmates. A true Web 2.0 success story, they found each other by way of Craigslist (see the original want ad below), and during the 'wait and see' portion of the funding process, performed gigs together under the band name El Desayuno. The band has actually published a CD (available on iTunes), and is quite good, in this humble geek's opinion. Check bits of their work out, both in the form of conversation about their company and clips from their music.

[This show sponsored by Audible. Get your free audiobook today at AudiblePodcast.com/Mashable]

A few days ago, Trulia, the real estate search engine, announced their integration with Google Streetview to bring a whole new level of detail to property tours online.  Currently, listings in 30 US cities are currently offered with a side dish of SteetView, and more material is to be added in real-time as it is captured.

This, though, is just a slice of what's available with Trulia.  To be honest, Trulia had escaped my personal radar of Web 2.0's I keep my eye on.  I imagine this has something to do with the fact that I worked in real estate related business for a number of years and burned out on them, combine with the fact that the search sector isn't my favorite sexy area of web technology.

Despite this, and given my experience in both areas, I'm keenly aware of how profitable these fields can be if gone about the right way. I got a chance to sit down with Trulia CEO Pete Flint, and they definitely seem to be going about things in the right way, having achieved the level of largest real estate search engine, providing a number of social and search tools to their users.

They're not the type of organization that just slaps in messaging and a couple of vampire vs. zombie applications and call themselves social.  They've thought out the bits and pieces of real estate utility that should remain social, and those that should remain anonymous, and those that can simply be served by search.

Additionally, they've got a number of API and webmaster utilities - and by the end of our conversation, I had arrived at the realization that a number of web design firms I knew could be cutting down a lot of their workload by using the Trulia API than trying to work with the hundreds of disparate real estate MLS systems that are in existence out there.

Our friends at Google gave us a ring yesterday, and wanted to know if we wanted to have a quick chat about the new Google App Engine today with our readers - we said sure. Our buddy at Google put us in touch with Google App Engine Product Manager Pete Koonen.  If you're reading this now, you probably missed the live call - which is fine, since we're sticking it in the podcast for you to grab that way, too.

He gave a much more succinct synopsis of the Google App Engine than I did in my fairly long first look, and cleared up a number of questions I and several readers had about the system.

We covered the topics of security, future languages that they'll offer, specifics about user privacy and Google Accounts (which is an optional system, unlike we originally thought). We even got a chance to chat about the biggest scandal of the week so far, apparently: HuddleChat-gate.

I had a chance to speak with Eric Litman today. He's a founder at Aux Interactive and the Managing Director of WashingtonVC. As you may have read earlier today, we are proud to announce a partnership with Litman's company Aux Interactive, a next-generation interactive agency focused on delivering high-value, metrics driven consumer and enterprise engagement through social media marketing and technology.

Or, in English, a social media agency that can get the job done when it comes to accomplishing what you want in terms of app development, re-tooling what current presences your organization currently has, or even getting to know exactly how you and your organization fits into the social media space.

To test out the theory that these guys were a bunch of geniuses, I spoke to their leader, Mr. Litman, and to be honest, I expected it to be a quick little show where we talk about the partnership, and maybe ad lib and riff on the nature of the Mashable/Aux relationship.  We ended up getting tangled in nearly an hour of conversation, covering everything from the history of technology as we knew it to the vagueries and elusive nature of profiting with applications designed to run on social networks.

In short, he agreed with almost every point of analysis I put out there, so that told me automatically he's a smart fellow. 

 

Brightcove today announced a partnership with a bunch of new content partners - Bebo, Meebo, RockYou, Slide and Veoh.  Besides making a pretty sing-songy headline, the partnership serves a number of useful purposes.  We took a look at the press release, and while it was pretty long, we figured it didn't really cover all the aspects and nuances of this new set of partnerships - the type of companies talked about here, while they're all content companies of some kind, are very diverse in what they do and how a partnership would work.

We sat down with Brightcove's Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy Adam Berrey to discuss that specifically.  Interestingly, he was also willing to discuss a blogosphere dustup that I had back in December with Jeremy Allaire, regarding Brightcove's strategy with regards to independent producers and monetization.

All in all a good listen, and a decent resource for content producers looking for wide distribution and those interested in advertising in online video.

Gizmoz is a bit of Web 2.0 technology that often gets pigeon-holed as strictly avatar software, but in fact is quite a bit more than that. Their technology is, at it's essence, the ability to generate 3D model object off of 2D images (namely, your face) - and then re-insert that into a 2D video file or image.

Aside from using it simply as a plug-in to your favorite messaging tool, you can also use it as a lightweight production tool, an art generation utility or a system to generate interactive widgets.

I sat down with founder of Gizmoz Eyal Gever on Mashable Conversations recently, and he explained a bit of the technology and the space that his company inhabits, and a bit about their recently raised funding. It's definitely an interesting conversation to sit in on.

Tim Huffman is a man with many stories, and one terrific company.  At first blush, the company blends in with a lot of other video and audio purveyors on the Internet, offering paid downloads of music related video.  What they've actually developed at iVideoSongs, though, is a unique blend of audio and video that provides not only entertainment value but a serious amount of utilitarian value as well.

Kristen reviewed the service back at DEMO in January:

I sat down with CEO Tim Huffman, talked a bit about his personal history (it involves a Grammy!), and the unique and unintended aspects of his company's work that have arisen since he's started.