Live at the Future of Web Apps Conference
Live at the Future of Web Apps Conference
4:00 PST – Carl Sjogreen – How We Built Google Calendar – Interesting insight into how an application is built at Google. Good points about researching users to find out what they really need, and I don’t mean your fellow geeks. Build to a vision, not to a set of features. Well that was interesting, focus on the interactions with users, not with the hard technology sticky points like timezones and recurring events. Most developmental methodologies would tell you to proof of concept the hard parts to make sure you can do them. Flip this around though and look at the user interactions as the hard parts that must be ironed out. Trying to be smart and parse out an event like Dinner with Frank at 8:00pm just pissed off users. My take, Let’s learn from Microsoft and not develop apps that try to think for you. “It looks like you’re writing a letter?”
3:55 PST – Mor Naaman – Zonetag mobile client demo – A Yahoo research project to capture the location information from your cell phone. The problem I see with this technology is the crappy camera in cell phones. I dread Flickr turning into a collection of low res fuzzy images. Can camera makers embed cell phone technology to grab the location from cell towers?
3:15 PST – Steve Olechowski – 10 Things You Didn’t Know About RSS – Interesting stats about RSS from Feedburner. RSS users have a different click thru profile versus web site users. Mobile is getting ready to heat up as more phones ship with RSS readers. I missed capturing the 10 points due to the spotty internet access. Switching over to using the Textmate blogging bundle so I can capture locally and upload as internet comes back up. Questions at the end: Do users choose a blog without ads versus a blog with ads. Stats say no. My take is to do it tastefully and people won’t mind. If you are maxing out the number of sets of Google ads you can put on your page, then you have too much.
2:15 PST – Tantek Celik – Best Practice with Microformats – Tantek has really polished his presentation on microformats since SXSW06. If you aren’t familiar with microformats, it’s a way of marking up your content so that users and machines can read and resuse it. Think publishing your contact information on the web so that users can click a link to download it to a vcard and store it into your address book. If you aren’t using microformats on your blog/website, it’s time to get going.
11:20 PST – The format of the conference is rather interesting, one room, short talks about focused topics. Compare this to SXSW where you must choose what you are going to miss. I like this format.
Tom Coates – Social Change on the Web – Interesting comparison of consensus based sites like Wikipedia versus community driven sites like Flickr and motives behind contribution. Slides here. Here’s one for Jason Calacanis, “Be wary of clumsy incentives like money, points & competition”
10:50 PST – Josh and I made it to San Fran late last night, 2am for us east coasters, nabbed a few hours of sleep and are now at the confernce listening to Kevin Rose talk about Digg. The story of how Digg came about is actually rather interesting. Kevin studied social networking and news sites and cherry picked his favorite features. Most interesting is the feature Kevin left out, tagging, citing the fragmentation that tagging can cause versus preset categories. It makes sense when you examine Kevin’s philosophy of wanting users to be able to find content easily. Web 2.0 is not a laundry list of me too features, contrary to popular belief. Josh is waiting in line for the Q&A to ask about paying Digg user: Sum it up, bad idea for Digg, no alterior motives.
Keep checking back as I update this post.
The revolution of the blog peasants - or who gives a hoot about the A-listers anyway ?
When the cover of Wired says “Get Naked … and Rule the World” we have to agree.
Get Naked Conversations on Amazon.
It’s amazing to both of us that the book has consistently been in the top 5,000 books on Amazon for months ever since it first came out last January (out of millions of books).
Thank you […]
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Maybe Gnomedex should co-locate with BlogHer?
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Eisner?s PromQueen hooks up with MySpace
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Mike has written a post on Techcrunch about getting your startup covered on the blog. There is a section in the new forum that allows entrepreneurs to pitch their startups. I haven’t written for Techcrunch in a long time, but from my own experience I can add a few tips:
Clearly identify what problem your product […]
Top 7 indicators of consumer Internet success
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