FOWA 07 - Is the Future of Web Apps User Generated Data ?

Day One of the Future of Web Applications conference in London, at the reception afterwards I was
interviewed by Italian videoblogger Nicola Mattina and he asked me why I came.

Why indeed?

I had a few seconds to think about it, and the off the cuff answer was my original reason - that it was an opportunity to hear from some of the US kingpin 2.0's like Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) and Kevin Rose (Digg) in person, plus see some kimono lifting from AOL, Amazon, Yahoo and Google, and meet them too. And network with other like minded people, of course. And it has been that, in spades.

But as I was saying all that, a second comment came out, a sort of subconscious reason surfaced - I said that the other thing we were really interested in was testing the economic assumptions of these Web 2.0 plays. The reason this came out then was, I think, a reaction to some of the hype (or more accurately "buzz") of the day - of which more anon.

First, a quick summary of my big takeaways - aka stuff I either hadn't heard before or really got me thinking. There is not a lot of point in giving a blow by blow account of each talk, the number of people furiously tapping into their laptops in the sessions means those will be coming thick and fast, I'm sure - here for example - I preferred to watch the wetware on the stage, however - see the whites of their eyes (or red for some of the US people....) as it were.

( though it seems that the WiFi may not have been working - boy did I feel smug with my 3G laptop datacard

First up to bat was Michael Arrington, talking about the things that drove startup success - all the usual stuff about entrepreneurs staying mean and hungry, having a great idea, flawless execution etc etc - and then the interesting one - he asked what came first, the Great Idea or the Business Plan, and noted that what would really succeed was a Good Idea, well executed, and avoidance of unnecessary costs. YouTube and Flickr were examples of companies that wound up being very different from what they started off as.

And then came the first Buzz thingy of the day - if the buzz isn't happening, rethink the product. More on this buzz stuff anon....

(Postscript - he also made some interesting comments on the next hot areas, but that is for another post...)

Next up was AOL's Edwin Aoki, who - praise be to him - pointed out that most of Web 2.0 was not new, email was still the biggest single web destination, users had been looking for (long) tail since the inception of the 'Net. He noted that even though much of the new technology is very disruptive to existing trust models, most users don't understand the security / privacy and social effects, or don't care. The really interesting thing (to me) that he noted was the default behaviour by the provider must be to Do The Right Thing....he quoted Spiderman - With great power comes great responsibility.

No Buzz here then, just good solid Business

Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency came swinging up next, and gave us a lot of good stuff about building online communities - to be honest, most of it is familiar to us already, but she does it so well...and she did have a few oft-forgotten nuggets like using your own product, ensuring you understand the benefit of your social network to the user, and making sure your users can access your service via as many on-ramps as possible. The thing I had not heard before was the theory of Startup Success via the Compelling Founder Story - doing something newsworthy was where it was at......getting that "buzz" was Very Important.

Buzz 2, Biz 1

Next came a talk about ducks - I mean the commoditisation of IT - from Simon Wardley of Fotango. First British Accent of the day. In essence he believes that all IT things start off as competitive advantages and end up as costs of doing business - I agree. Very entertaining presentation (You had to be there to get the ducks and kittens with guns stuff.....)

After that another Brit, VC Ben Holmes of Index Ventures - giving an excellent rundown of VC economics and what a VC wants from its victims - I mean clients . There aws a lot of sizzle about Stardoll and other success stories, but the takeaway from me this year is that the emphasis was on the Great Team and its ability to execute - a retreat, I am sure, from the Great Product requirement of a few years ago, clearly competition is hotting up - though they have not yet fallen back to the Great Idea of Mr Arrington yet....). I had just met the real Fred Destin, (whose blog I like) and here is his take on this talk.

Getting into the groove next were Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa-Cavia from Last.fm, who gave a good run through of last.fm's heady rise, and a lot of good stuff on the analytics they are using - we've seen this sort of stuff used by Yahoogle and the really sharp customer analytics companies, so its interesting to see it rolling out to social net users. The real takeaway was the allusion to a Pandora gambit though...they will be giving Last.fm fewer barriers to entry, making it quicker to get up and running. (It is our view that in a more competitive future, a social net that cannot get its users up and running fast will lose out to ones that can)

TJ Kang of ThinkFree suffered from the standard problem of anyone giving a live demo - the connection died, so it was very hard to work out exactly what it did that was different. Been there
Takeaway here is NEVER do a live demo without a Plan B. Ever.

Next was Werner Vogels, going through Amazon's amazing S3 and EC2 projects......a very, very thoughtful presentation, and I am an S3 / EC2 fan. But, when all is said and done, its basically Web Hosting 2.0 - which has basically all the same rationales as Web Hosting 1.0* - I think I may have some of the same presentations from 1999 still - except the billing is now by the drink, not the bottle. But that's not the takeaway - what you really need to know is that it's a hell of a lot cheaper now than Web 1.0 was, and probably works better!

Then Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo, quite a lot I'd seen before on Flickr - new stuff for me was a run through of "Interestingness" (I have grumbled about it's very broad patent here before), some thoughts about metadata clustering and some notes about use of Pipes. Big takeaway - Yahoo will be applying API's to some of their Web 1.0 social media assets, like Yahoo Groups.

Steve Stokols of BT took a quick canter through latest release BT Contact, and made some observations that chime with our work on Telco 2.0, viz:
- Traditional Telco product lines are being blurred
- P2P technology is not something Telcos can avoid, and must embrace it
- Advertising will be a viable business model in the Telco space
- 1:1 voice is not enough, its many:many

There were two product pitches, SooCial and Quotations book, but both were very new and short, but lots of buzz

Last up, Kevin Rose of Digg - lots of asides on digg, diggers, digging and diggerati. He announced that they would support Open ID "soon", and that they would start to release APIs and fragment the front page into various niches as it is now too wide in its coverage, with techies burying sleb stories and sleb groupies doing vice versa. Takeaway here for me was, like Last.fm, another social network site is getting seriously jiggy with its user generated data, not just its content.

Now, that bit about The Economics...here's what got to me

First the Buzz - there was muted drone through the day about Getting Buzz, a sort of subtext that This Really, Really Mattered. Why worry though? - simply because this is how Bubble 1.0 started - people started to let go of basic economics, and started to believe in a self referential business model.

Second the Analytics - I can best state this as juxtaposing the Ed Aoki's view that with great power comes great responsibility, and exposition during the day about analysis. User Generated Content was clearly NOT what the Future of Web Applications will be about - its going to be about User Generated Data, and there is a risk that it will not necessarily be with any Spidey Sense involved.

And while any Metric System is good, I think breaking user trust will be very, very dangerous for any service that is seen to do so in future.

* Web Hosting is basically an outsourcing model, you focus on your business, we worry about scalable infrastructure.