Things are heating up

My friend Alicia moved to San Francisco recently. She's looking for a job, so she doing a lot of prowling around craigslist. For the last couple of weeks she's been sending me links to interesting job postings in the area. (I think she wants company in SF.)

After looking around a little myself, it seems like the talent search is really heating up in the bay area. Searching the job listings with a keyword of "startup" returns more than 300 listings in the last month. Now, I'm sure this doesn't compare to the height of the boom, but it's way more than I remember seeing in the last couple of years — or even two months ago.

And the listing themselves seem substantive — consumer-focused web startups, stealth-mode startups, companies with change-the-world ambitions. Lots of big opportunities. And of course, Google is always hiring.

Ever since last spring, I've felt big changes coming: conversations sparking, ideas germinating, pressures building, forces aligning. After a long winter, real innovation is happening — innovation that will affect my life. People are talking about technology for its own sake again. They're building applications and services because they love the technology and what they can do with it. And they are cross-pollinating ideas like the early days of the web. We've already seen the first flowerings. I'm convinced there are even bigger things to come. Web 2.0, indeed. I'm so ready for it.