"Companies are focused less on inventing the future and more on what they're going to take away from the competition," he said.

As in previous years, companies will probably take advantage of the industry attention on the conference to make product announcements. Facebook, for example, will hold a press conference on Monday morning in San Francisco to announce what is rumored to be a major enhancement to its messaging capabilities. The company may launch a full-fledged webmail service, with Microsoft involved in a significant way, according to various media reports.

"Getting into e-mail is a natural extension of what Facebook is doing. E-mail is probably the most widely used form of modern-day social networking, and most of us still do more social networking with e-mail than with any specialized tool every day, including networking to get our work done," said IDC analyst Al Hilwa, who hasn't been briefed on the announcement.

"Facebook is already being used extensively as a marketing and CRM [customer relationship management] tool as social and business worlds continue to blur. Moving deeper into the enterprise sector is a natural growth strategy. So, it is about time Facebook started looking beyond its established franchise to leverage its brand and user base for other ventures," he said via e-mail.

In that sense, it's only fitting that Web 2.0 Summit kicks off on Monday with a keynote appearance by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, a company whose restlessness and eagerness to branch out from its core business of search exemplify the main theme of the event.