This week saw the fourth edition of Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. What is Web 2.0 and why should you care about it? The answer will depend to a certain extent on where you live, where you work, and whether or not you have teenagers and young adults in your midst.

Wikipedia, itself a quintessential Web 2.0 organization, defines it as “a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.” Wikipedia further characterizes Web 2.0 as the utilization of blogs, social bookmarking, podcasts, RSS feeds, social software, web application programming interfaces (APIs), and online web services to improve upon the more static, plain vanilla websites. Not to worry, though – if these terms are foreign to you (other than the notion of a blog, of course), you’re in luck – Wikipedia has great definitions of them all. The simple notion of “Three C’s of the Internet” (Content, Commerce and Community) is so last century.

Some of these concepts have arguably been around for years, but many of them are undergoing a reboot into new and exciting directions. In the past, around the age of “sneaker-net,” many of you used shared network drives and, later, intranets, to distribute and organize information. We at Lending Club rely heavily on our wiki and Google Docs to track and collaborate on projects, and we use Skype to chat among ourselves. Our executives are not only quoted in print but are also featured in podcasts.

Beyond that, Web 2.0 is also shaping business models, including that of Lending Club. In a recent Forbes article , our CEO recalls how Lending Club launched as a widget on Facebook. Like other Web 2.0 companies, most of Lending Club’s “content” (loan listings) is user-generated. And LendingMatch™, the matching engine on Lending Club, works a bit like Amazon’s book recommendation service to point lenders to the best loans matching their interests and preferences. In fact, our CTO Joaquin Delgado is a guest speaker at Recommender System 2007 in Minneapolis this weekend.

But you can also think of Web 2.0 as a mindset or lifestyle of sorts, particularly if you live in high-tech and startup centers such as the Bay Area, the Baltimore-Washington technology corridor, and Austin, Texas. These techie gadgets will permeate almost every aspect of life if you let them. When we celebrated Lending Club’s public launch, pictures of our sailing trip were posted on community photo-sharing sites within a few hours. We updated our friends on Facebook, and we wrote about our adventure here on this blog post to include you, our loyal readers, in the fun.

It’s never too late to get started, but beware: Web 3.0 is coming.

Lending Club was privileged to present this week at Finovate, a one-day conference focused on innovative companies that are creating the next generation of financial services. Kudos to Jim Bruene and NetBanker for a meeting that let each company demonstrate its offering to an overflow audience of press, bloggers, bankers, techies, and beyond.

At a high level, there were two kinds of companies at the conference: Web 2.0 and Mobile. The mobile technology available to banks and consumers is becoming more and more impressive with time – allowing people to manage everyday finances directly from their mobile devices. Someday, we will all be paying bills with our cell phones.

The Web 2.0 lineup was great as well. The participants included loan companies, personal finance companies, and even a virtual collection agency. Every company had a good presentation – most all of them were able to show the new and improved experience that financial services customers can have thanks to recent innovations.

We had the pleasure of talking with executives from all across the industry about possible deals and new ways to apply our technology and services. We spoke with bloggers and reporters, who put up a video blog and an article about Finovate.

I am particularly proud of our 7-minute demonstration of Lending Club where John Donovan explained our company's approach and market strategy while I lent $500 to 20 different borrowers using our leading edge LendingMatch™ technology. Each of the borrowers got great rates, the audience response to our p2p lending platform was excellent, and the overwhelming interest after the demonstration was great to see. We think making loans to people at great rates using our p2p lending approach will be a big and growing part of financial services going forward.

Thanks again to Finovate and congratulations to all of our co-presenters on moving financial services into the future.