Simon’s presentation focused on a number of things which also feature large in my personal tag cloud. Not ducks (although I like them, too) but:

1. Commoditisation of IT – how the movement from new thing to utility service creates tensions as products move from competitive advantage to the cost of doing business

2. Innovation – how the shift from Today’s Hot Stuff to Tomorrow’s Boredom (or, as Tom Standage puts it, the move towards invisible technology) drives, and is driven by, commoditisation

3. How the “new world” of the API and computing in the cloud becomes a utility service: how in this day and age we should be looking at the cloud for IT services and not building and re-building each time we put an application on the web. It’s a view which I’m pushing as hard as I can whenever I can, and it’s lovely to see such an erudite set of slides on a subject area which isn’t the easiest to explain.

It also turns out that Simon has written about the Internet Of Things, Spimes and a bunch of other stuff which really tickle my interest, but these might have to wait until a later post…

One of the major contrasts with Simons presentation, as I said previously was that he really can present in an amusing and interesting way, which was in sharp contrast to pretty much everyone else at the FOWA conference. His presentation style reminded me very much of Dick Hardt’s now famous Identity 2.0 talk which you should check out if you haven’t already.

Arrived 5 minutes late for this one…but I believe that Fire Eagle is something to do with location based services…

Some examples of what you could build:

- Twitter maps
- Geotagging all user generated content
- Phone based applications for event coordination
- Proximiser. Look busy when your boss gets close to you…
- tailored information for mobiles based on location….huge number of examples based on this…

Obviously there are huge privacy issues around constant uploading of location data. Fire Eagle claims to deal with these issues by giving complete control to end users, including a ‘hide me’ button if you’re ‘doing something naughty’…

Visualisation isn’t a technology but a medium. Stamen are concerned with how these visualisations can affect emotions.

He’s showing a slide of colours for voting in the last US elections and demonstrating how this can be broken down into more detail, or distorted to display in different ways.

Percentage of chart which resembles pacman (boingboing) http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/02/hilarious-piechartvi.html

See cabspotting.org interactive which shows cabs in SF. Lovely ways of mapping these by speed and location.

Oakland crime: interactive which takes something which was originally just searchable and makes it explorable instead.

Built using modestmaps.com

Digg Labs: visualisation of stories. Also see Stack, Swarm, Big Spy and Ark, sponsored by intel…

Twitter Blocks takes twitter data and puts it into 3d.

Real Estate Flow: Trulia data showing real estate data over time.

Generally most have come to agree that the semantic web vision has failed. Why? Because there is a considerable effort required to ‘semantify’ the web and almost noone has spent the money.

RSS and API’s are starting to follow this vision. Mashmaker, BlueVision and Facebook are all doing SemWebby stuff.

What has really been happening to support SW?

First off, the concept of feeds. Second the concept that less is more. REST wins over SOAP, microformats win over RDF/OWL.

Dapper aims to create a semantically meaningful layer over the top of the web. It lets users choose pages on the web and then separate form from content by assigning content to semantically named fields which are then published as xml or other formats.

Semantically based advertising is one interesting area of development. Search is also a bit of a holy grail.

The Dapper guys are now doing a demo of a search engine based on dapper data. It’s pretty impressive, allowing users to query data semantically, for example to look for recipes where ingredient=chocolate or venue=London.

Questions..

Someone pointed out that this is based on screen scraping, and asked about the fragility of this. Dapper apparently has the means to take this on board, looking for inaccuracies in data and responding accordingly.

It has always struck me that the biggest challenge for Dapper (or in fact anything SWebby) is explaining what is essentially a very complex topic. There is no 2 minute elevator pitch for Semantic Web.

I wrote 4 pages of notes and there’s no way I can do the talk justice on here without getting bleeding thumbs, so I’ll write a whole separate post later…

43 million active users, doubling every month. Very international – half users outside the US. 50% of users return daily.

Social Graph: about sharing as much information as you can with as many ppl as you can.

Photos: more traffic than all the other photo sharing apps out there. Ditto events, which plugs straight into the social graph.

Use Facebook scripting and markup languages to build facebook apps.

Provides a way to spread use of facebook applications through the social graph.

Growth, engagement and monetization is main path for all web apps. Facebook claims that they step over the first two phases and into the third as quickly as possibl.

More than 5000 applications on facebook already in only 3 months. 90000 developers in Facebook community. Over 80% of users have added one or more than one Facebook application.

Some guy just asked the question I wanted to ask, about opening the social graph on Facebook. He pretty much sidestepped the question, which is annoying, as I suspect it’s a question on many people’s minds. When is Facebook going to open up their data as an external API? It’s interesting that Morin is using the privacy conversation as a way of closing down this discussion. I guess it’s an important point, but I’d still like to see a bit more transparency on this.

Here’s the tips:

Do a lot with a little…if you have a small team then wear many shoes: do lots of things around the team.

Use open source tools. The expertise out there will always be bigger and better then what you can provide. Use it.

Network, both on and offline. Share knowledge where you can.

Be kind to your database…cache where you can, both at db and at page level. Cache static pages..use queuing. Use limits and pagination: not only do you not want this on page from a usability pov, it’s also a performance hit. Avoid complication- check if you really really need to do X.

Expect anything. You probably will have down time so have backups and version control.

Keep lots of data: stats, quantitative measures, logs. You’ll be glad of it later.

Keep in touch with your community – let users know what you’re doing and when.

Here goes:

Fowa is all about ideas, not about the technology behind it. Webapps of the future need to be everywhere – on PSP, phone, iphone…

Learn from the past – small and beautiful beats large and clunky. Don’t worry about the infrastructure. Focus on standards and openness but in a responsible way.

More at dev.aol.com

It’s interesting that the response to FOWA is the same for me this year as it was last. I’m glad I’m here, but it’s a reaffirming of what (I think) we all know already. I haven’t come away full of new ideas and insights (which is possibly what you’d hope from a conference titled ‘Future of Web Apps’), but I have been reassured that my thinking and knowledge is up to date and aligned with the leaders in the field.

The recurring messages (and these were much the same as last year):

- iterate often
- focus on single points of pain
- know your audience
- be honest and transparent when things go wrong
- don’t seek perfection

The only final thing to say before I go do some more geek mingling is that most of these people are REALLY TERRIBLE at giving presentations. I know geeks don’t traditionally have a huge range of social skills, but still. ..these are basic things: don’t rely on a network connection, know your audience (ironic, that), make sure you talk to time, don’t mumble…It’s presentation skills level 1…

Enough moaning. More tomorrow.

- “be a third place”: people have work, home and the place they go to hang out. If you can be that place, as Facebook is to many, then you’re on to a winner
- “eat your own dogfood”: live and breathe your app; respond to a pinch point in your life or work and build something YOU would use
- “allow unintended uses – build out based on the edges”: watch people using your app or community in different ways and capitalise on this.

Next was Heidi Pollock who gave some interesting insights into mobile app development. In no particular order:

- africa as growth market: ppl using mobile to access the web because they don’t have a PC, not because choose to
- screen size standard 176px, and stick to a 10k download limit. Some phones down to 128px. Motorola V3 is 30chrs x 8 lines…
- more than 3000 phones types, often with browsers unique to each type

Interesting that there are no H or LI tags in xhtml mobile 1, and that B tags are used instead of STRONG (B is shorter, so less bytes!). Ultimately this all means that the Semantic Web is left behind on mobile devices…