FOWA 07 - The Future of Web Apps - Gone Phishin'

So.....Day 2 of The Future of Web Applications emerged blearily from the steam of my coffee cup (The Day Job being something one does at night when on conferences...) and we were tipped into a morning of not so much the Future of Web Applications, but The Present of Product Sales as IE7 and Adobe Flex were run through by affable guys with jeans (jeans are Chinos 2.0 ), american accents and the obligatory folksy references to families, flexible solutions, "new paradigms" (aka a new feature) and so on and so forth.

OK, OK, a bit unfair I know, but these were both bright guys who I felt could have contributed real insight to the FOWA if released a bit from the corporate straight and narrow. The one thing I got from this was from the Microsoft chap was that they did lose their way a bit, and noting that the in the Future of IE, Security will be No. 1

Next up though was Khoi Vinh, who gave a fascinating presentation about how a pre - Web 1.0 company - the New York Times - deals with web 2.0. ( ie Social Media, where you anti-socially pinch their content to chuck it into The Conversation on your blog and get all the linklurve and kudos without paying a bean). There was a LOT of stuff in his talk to take away, here are some gems:

- Content is evolving into functionality....and functionality is context
- Visual Schizophrenia - users are adopting high end - HDTV, Digital SLRs - and Low end - YouTube, Camphones - at the same time.
- McMediazation - in Old Media, the content authors bear the cost of functionality, in New Media the user does - so do you offend the few experts or teh many novices in your design for functionality?

However, the real takeaway was in the question session when someone asked why not use the popular companies' products (eg delicious) to do the stuff, why should the NYT DiY? Khoi's response was good - they needed it to be fit for the NYT's purpose, not just for purpose.

Agree totally - since the underlying technology is actually pretty simple (compared to the infrastructure layers) and "Web 2.0" is all about making it all easily user choosable and do-able , why are you somehow going against the faith just because you don't use the posterchildren's stuff?

Next up was Simon Willison, an evangelist who delivered a passionate sermon for Open ID. Given all the hype that this has generated recently (see NetVibes below) it was good to hear someone go through the rationale of the product, and even talk about its weaknesses. Not sure why it is such a breakthrough - the concept is hardly original, it doesn't really do much for trust and preventing antisocial media behaviours like phishing, and it still leaves you creating multiple personae - but judging by the Hallelelujahs of The Faithful it seems like this is the Next Big Thing.

(To me , the Trust endgame is when My Data is on My System under My Control - just having a choice of potentially untrustworthy third parties doesn't do it for me)

Lunch, met another blogger in real space whose work I like (Suw Charman) and starved her by keeping her talking* - topic du jour was stopping Tech letting the Work Culture impinge too far in Life. (must admit I had to wonder if its a lost battle, looking at all those people in the hall with their laptops open, furiously typing away while someone was talking

There was a session on Us vs UK entrpreneurialism, (here's a summary).....didn't go as its all been said so many times already, but check out this post by Saul Klein.

Then came the Googletalk given by Jonathan Rochelle, who flogged his company to Google, and it was all about Google Office. I had hoped he would talk about How To Build A Company Google Would Buy , but it was about spreadsheets and that stuff. Oh, and how, to Google, the User Data is Sacred, and they won't peek into it, No Sirree. He admitted this one was proving to be quite a tough sell. My big takeaway - because they had user involvement early in the process they were able to defuse some of the internal politics during the development cycle by pointing to what users themselves wanted.

Next, the User Slots - talks that We (albeit a tiny %) had voted for - Very good talk by Simon Hawkins on a topic close to our heart, which is how to build the infrastructure for a Virtual Company. Some good stuff, and I felt there was some learning we have that we could contribute back - maybe we need a social network for virtual companies to swop tips. Had to leave for a bit, so missed the next two.

Back to hear Dan Applequist talk about The Future of Mobile. Having contributed some of our material to the recent Mobile Web 2.0 book I was interested to see where Dan would go for the FOMWA, but I'm afraid it was another Back to the Future moment - all about how the majors were going after common standards, defining best practices (in their self limited worlds) and so on - sounded just like the Fixed Line Telcos c 1995. The questions were equally predictable - when will prices come down, and why does it take iPhone to do the obvious stuff you would want in a 'phone browser. Dan is a smart guy, so just watching him dancing the steps in the standard Mobile mambo mumbo jumbo was frustrating.

He did talk a bit about BetaVine, the Voda developer platform, and kudos for them pushing this boat out - but the issue is, until there is a common Planet Mobile rather than just a Voda platform, those X billion mobile users they keep on banging on about still fragment into Z thousand different niche platforms.

I hate to even think this heretical thought, but they need a Bill Gates badly.

Next we were addressed by Rasmus Lerdorf, who created PHP - this is as close to a Geek God as one can get, but I'm afraid most of the talk was techie porn so not printable in a polite blog like this. The big takeaway though was his view that there is no solution to Phishing apart from typing in the URL.

Now, on to some Mo' Buzz. After being told that Tariq Krim's NetVibes would be making a Big Announcement, we were in eager anticipation - what was it - a sale of the century, a paradigm of great import, a solution to phishing even? Nope, it was cross platform widget compability and they will support be supporting Open ID.

Hallelujah, the congregation clapped and whistled again.

Next up, Richard Moross and Stefan Magdalinski of MOO (who make those tiny business cards that I can't read and that slip out my pocket.....). The talk was a good discussion of how a great marketing approach transformed a me-too industry play. A lot of great marketing ideas, but fundamentally you use a channel like Flickr and a low cost distributor like the Royal Mail. My big takeaway - the Royal Mail hugely underprices its services, I know where our next consulting pitch will be....

Last in the show was Brice of Contact Office who showed how they migrated a 1999 Web 1.0 system into a Web 2.0 world, mainly by making heavy use of Google Web Toolkit. Big takeaway - they have a revolutionary Web 2.0 business model - they ask their users to pay for the product.

It'll never catch on



* Suw has stenographed the entire conference...awesome feat - I was trying to get her own thoughts, but she just gave me a mona lisa smile on that......