Future of Web Apps, London 2007 · Mar 2, 16:01

Gaelle, Richard and myself were at the excellent Future of Web Apps conference (London) last week, organised by the ever resourceful Carson Systems crew.

The general focus of this year’s conference seemed to be more business orientated than last year. The likes of Adobe, Amazon, and BT talked about their latest products and services which wasn’t especially engaging. I think Adobe missed a trick showing people what their new rich web apps framework Apollo is all about.

However, Ben Holmes of Index Ventures talk on startups and funding was enlightening. I had no idea how complex the venture capital process is and it was good to get some practical tips on when such funding routes are good to follow.

If there was one thing I took back from the conference, it was OpenID. I had just signed myself up for an account at openid.net just before the conference, but had little idea of how we could use it in our web apps. The concept of single sign-on is bound to kick off big time over the coming years and is something to seriously look into.

Stefan Fountain had a fabulous time acting up to promote his venture Soocial.com – if you’re going to try and sell your product onstage, take a tip from Stefan.. humour certainly works. The same could be said of Simon Wardley from Fotango who mostly talked about ducks, a topic close to my own heart, and something about commoditisation.

The networking was good, though with so many people it was a little bewildering (from so many different places too, I met people from Sweden, France, USA and New Zealand). Free booze courtesy of Adobe is always appreciated, but I suspect it would have been more fun in a bar rather than the hall of the conference venue.

It was nice to meet Lisa Price, editor of ThinkVitamin and previously responsible for bringing .net magazine kicking and screaming into the web standard’s age. Well done her!

The workshops were a really good idea, helping expand on the conference presentations. Being three of us we managed to cover 75% of the workshops so had a pretty good time of it. Khoi Vinh’s workshop on grid design for the web was excellent; tapping into the history of grids in design and through to recreating a certain famous web portal using a strict grid system.

And some comments from Richard…
The guys from moo.com had a strong presence there and it’s really interesting to see how a slick application can be built on top of an existing web app like flickr (although they’re diversifying the web services they use). I’m a big fan of the moo card product and their ethos and it was satisfying to see that they were developing on the same platforms as we use at Studio 24 (MySQL, PHP).

The other seemingly big push is towards “attention data”, which could be a mighty valuable resource in the future. For example, Last.fm records which tracks are skipped while flickr judges ‘Interestingness’ by how long people look at a photo and so on. This sort of data is much richer and more informative than trawling web logs for page visits and so on.

— Simon R Jones


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