Sunday, February 25, 2007

Future of Web Apps... London 20-22 Feb 2007

Finally posting about the Future Of Web Apps conference put together by Carson Systems last week... It was really a good show. Seems to me to hit a more down-to-earth audience than other shows, and the single stream of collective consciousness also helps (everyone experiences the same presos and they stay on time since there's Ryan there to kick speakers off on time).
There were many talks that I really enjoyed... Khoi Vinh (NY Times Design Lead) had some really strong late slides which abstracted the difficulty of web/ui design that I really could relate to. Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo) was really great (sans his rather low-blow comparison of YouTube and Flickr - where he got to choose the content to compare - a kick-boxing monkey video versus some really clean professional images - sad part was, for all humanity, the kick-boxing monkey got a rise from the crowd more than anything else)...Funny, that during Bradley's talk on Pipes, I was alerted to a post where someone uses Google Spreadsheet as an input stream to Pipes as a cure for OPML streams....
Simon Willison gave an incredible, information-packed talk on OpenID that could be turned into a full-day course.
I spoke at this one... about Google Docs & Spreadsheets (of course). I tried to make it targeted to a developer audience without making it technical (so I wouldn't embarass myself ;) and focusing on "lessons learned" during the development process.
Anyway.... I think it was generally well received... some liked it and some did not. But the highlight of the conference for me was meeting some incredible people. The founders of Citzen Agency - Tara Hunt and Chris Messina - are just great people, who also have great ideas and strong values - and a large following of fans. I also got to know a bit of Simon Willison, Natalie Downe, Ian Forrester, Jeremy Keith, and a host of others... including Chris Wilson of Microsoft who taught us all about the history and future of IE. I owe him 5 GBP .... not for his great talk (that really was worth more than 5 quid), but for paying my way at the Geek Dinner! Oh, and then there was that hysterical incident at the underground ticket vending machine...
Thanks to the Carson Systems team for a great job putting on this one....

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