So what a few days it has been,
I think I am just adjusting to the time difference here in London. Me and Paolo from Teknision are here attending the
Future of Web Apps conference.Lots to talk about,
First off, as my good comrade
Stace(BitchWhoCodes) has announced, we have a new
Teknision site up. The case study videos for Finetune and PermissionTV are pretty awesome, so if you have a chance check them out in the showcase section.
As for the FOWA Conference, I have lots of stuff to talk about:
I spent a lot of the day hanging out with Mark Anders and the Adobe team in the booth. We have been chatting about Apollo. They are showing off samples and getting people excited. I tend to get involved, and help them with their pitches. Most AJAX heads are still trying to figure it all out and how it applies to their work. People are starting to understand it though. There are a lot of good vibes surrounding the product.
Mike Arrington referred to Apollo a few times in his presentation. Geeze, somebody build that guy an Apollo Email app already! He's hard up for it!
The LastFM presentation was of particular interest to me. We are competing in that same space building players with
Finetune. They talked a lot about managing "
Attention Data". This was the conference hot word of the day. It is real data that is collected based on a users actual usage of a service and then put into context to make a service more relevant to the user. In LastFM's case they were talking about AudioScrobbler data, but other presenters discussed this topic as well, including Kevin Rose from Digg.
The Attention Data talk was a lot more interesting than the usual dredging on about the value of social networking..,... "Yeah, yeah we get it already....!"
Kevin Rose's talk was a little underwhelming. Digg is a massive success and a prime example of Web 2.0 in action, but his presentation seemed a little unfocused. It was focused on things like: "here's some Digg usage numbers", and "we might do this in the future", but really, I didn't leave the presentation feeling like I knew any more than when I went in. He does share the same birthday as Paolo though! Happy Birthday Paolo Farago and Kevin Rose!
It was great hanging out with Craig Swann. He is also attending, and it feels good to have a familiar face from the Flash scene in the mix.
Finally, we had a chat with a guy from Google. He came over and introduced himself to us (Paolo, Craig, and myself) and we proceeded to talk about anything and everything about Web Applications. He seemed a bit refreshed talking to a group of Flash developers, as opposed to the usual web development crowd, and at the end of the talk, we recommended that he attend a Flash conference.
We told him that if he really wanted to see the other side of application development, and leave an event inspired, he should check one out. Flash conferences (most of the time) are focused on inspiring as opposed to informing.
The FOWA conference has been good after the first day for the most part, but does seem a bit stiff compared to what I am used to. "It isn't a conference unless Josh Davis blows something up, and puts it back together (randomly....)."
Tomorrow, there is a presentation about
OpenID. Identity is a really interesting emerging space, and one to keep a close eye on. As a matter of fact
Digg announced today that they intend to support OpenID in the future. This is a really big deal. In the past
I posted about this, and pointed out a great presentation by Dick Hardt on the topic. If you haven't seen it, or do not know what the Identity 2.0 movement is about then
check this out.
