like last year, (almost) all the talks & slides from the Future of Web Apps have been published by Carson Systems. I’ve setup an RSS-feed for those who don’t want to go through the hassle of downloading every single file. enjoy!
Tariq Krim from Netvibes just announced the release of an open source javascript runtime (Universal Widget API, UWA) including the Netvibes UI-library. no details on their blog yet, but this should kick off an avalanche of additional Netvibes-module, further strengthening Netvibes’ lead in the market (click for an Alexa traffic-comparison of Netvibes, Pageflakes etc.). TechCrunch has far more details than Tariq just disclosed in his 5minute presentation…basically the API should ensure that widgets work cross-platform, including Vista, Mac OS Dashboard and Google for now, with support of Yahoo! Widgets following later. besides, Krim announced the upcoming support of OpenID, which probably makes open, decentralized authentication the hottest topic of this years fowa.
fowa2007, day #2 - wifi is still sluggish & expensive.
nothing too breathtaking from Microsoft (Chris Wilson) and Adobe (Mark Anders), though the Flex-demo was kinda intriguing - flash is finally making sense for developers. the CEO (?) of Scrybe gave a short performance-comparison of actionscript 2 vs. 3, which also seemed kinda impressing. He should’ve demo’ed Scrybe though, to really show what Flex/Apollo can do (btw, my Scrybe-beta account still doesnt work 
).
check out Twingly, a screensaver (Windows only) done by swedish students which visualizes blog-activity on a rotating globe…
Khoi Vinh (director of design for NYTimes.com) - avoid the “The Siren Call of Web 2.0″ (Web 2.0 - pros can’t get enough, users have no idea what it is!)… good talk on NYTimes’ design approaches & challenges, hopefully slides will be available…
Jonathan Rochelle (Google) - “Google Docs & Spreadsheets - the product name sucks, but at least nobody will be confused”.
Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone) - “thematic consistency - ensure that content provided by accessing a URI yields thematically coherent experience when accessed through different devices”. check http://dev.mobi, a developer-community focused on mobile webapps (take their survey and receive a 20 US$ iTunes gift-certificate).
Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP): “I don’t find joy in the process of programming. it’s kinda tedious & hard.”…great, geeky tech-talk. if you’re into performance measurement, check out http_load / valgrind / callgrind / Kcachegrind (prints nice execution-path trees). Rasmus on security: “the web is broken you can all go home now.”
and with these wise words I’m closing this post & and say goodbye fowa 2007 - we’ve had a blast! 
fowa2007 - day #1
11.40 - Simon Wardley on commoditizing of IT: “there’s no sense whatsoever in setting up your own IT-infrastructure. maintaining your own web- or database-servers is what we call yak-shaving“. Zimki offers “pre-shaved yaks”, meaning a fully hosted, server-side javascript environment for rapid application development (not to forget Amazon S3 & EC2, which commoditizes web-infrastructure on a lower level).
13.45 - Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia talk about attention data, tag cloud moderation and past, presence & future of Last.fm. they also shared some stunning usage numbers:
15mio tracks are scrobbled each day (that’s
1575 174 /sec or 6billion tracks since 2003). there are 190mio artists, 70 mio tracks, 700k tracks available for streaming, 145k artist wikis.
14.45 - CTO Amazon Werner Vogels sells us on S3, EC2 & SQS (Simple Queueing Service) and encourages companies to compete on ideas, not on technology. currently, the 30/70-switch rule demands 70% resources spent on the technological “heavy lifting”, while only 30% go into the product/idea. posterboy S3-implementations include SmugMug, SecondLife (just for client-downloads), YouOS; renderRocket (a virtual renderfarm) is one of few current EC2-users. interesting detail: Mechnical Turk’s not internationally available because of conflicts with labour-laws.
16.20 - according to this post, Kevin Rose is about to make an announcement regarding digg later today. stay tuned for real-time updates
17.20 - Rose enters the stage… his talks’ topic is “the future of crowd generated media”…talking about the Digg-ecosystems, motivations for users to digg & submit content - Digg trys to buid incentives for users on every level (frontpage-exposure, traffic, networks of friends etc). he’s mostly summarizing what Digg has been doing the past two years. enhancing Digg (stuff they’re working on): how to manage a user-community of 900k, how-to implement fact-checking on stories (Digg does community-based, since a paid employees a la netscape.com won’t scale). Digg wants to enable/create connections between users based on several numbers - Diggs, buries, comments, word-strength etc. showing some slides on development of Digg-usage since 2005 + summarizing their flash-tools + announcing a “Flash Toolkit” later that year, which should help publishers monitoring their stories. commitment on APIs & export of user attention-data. finally the announcement: Digg is going to support OpenID in the future (also see TechCrunch)
that’s it for today…Wifi didnt really work very well, plus it’s not free maybe we’re more lucky tomorrow.
