The Future of Web Apps, and Diggnation: A Round-up

Well as I said before, we went off to ExCel in London’s Docklands to the Future of Web Apps conference on Wednesday. It was simply amazing! We arrived at around 8:45am, and were greeted by the booths with passes. Of course this was too simple, as they didn’t have my pass there… That said, the organisers there were amazing about it, and simply gave me a blank pass which got me in. Whether they would have done more stringent identity checks had I asked for a pass above the £5 expo-only pass, because they didn’t even check my name, I am not sure.

Once the initial ‘drama’ was over, we explored the expo-floor. It was a ghost-town at this time in the morning, which it turned out was because a lot of people were already there, but in the ‘Showcase Stage’ where some of the paid talks were taking place. First things first, onto the free WiFi provided for attendees of FoWA. For this the ‘Microsoft Lounge’ provided the perfect seating arrangements – Microsoft Visual Studio, and Expression-branded beanbags. Much Xbox 360, and Halo 3 playing ensued, as obviously it would have been rude to not play when Microsoft had provided six networked Xboxs for our amusement…

Once the conference got going, we had a wander around the floor, and some of the exhibits were really good. Meecard looks very interesting, and may finally lead to an end of the many different new services cropping up which are effectively a clone of an existing service, but with one new special feature which means everybody must switch. Instead, I can set up a meecard (such as my own here) which can have as little or as much data on it as I like, and links to most of my social services. While something like Google Reader is a News Feed Aggregator, I see meecard as a Social Aggregator, bringing all of the social services I use to one easy to find and comprehend place.

Another of note was Wakoopa, who not only had hacked iPhones there to attract people (it worked!) but also were talking about their next big planned development – to log which Web Apps you use (should you choose to allow it to). This means that it will record how long you spend on, for example, the GMail webpage. I queried on the privacy implications this raises, and they assured me that instead of sending your web history to Wakoopa for analysis, the Wakoopa client will instead look for specific sites which they can log, and only send usage info for these, so it does remove some of the privacy issues, although I am not sure how comfortable I would be with something putting my specific web usage onto a public page, and what info they displayed would be of great importance. That said I will be looking at these new features with interest if, and when, they are released.

The Microsoft stand was also interesting. They were talking about ‘Expression’ – their competitor to Adobe’s Creative Suite. A friend of mine, who is an avid user of Photoshop, with some astounding results (see here), mentioned that from the looks of it Expression was more accessible to users who were unfamiliar with Photoshop. For someone like me, who has always been scared or beaten by Photoshop, this is good news. One thing I did find very amusing was that the main computers that Microsoft had for Expression were MacBook Pros. One was running Windows Vista through Boot Camp, and the other was running in OS X, but it was a surreal site, and the last place I thought I would see those!

The other main highlight was meeting Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht – the hosts of Diggnation. It was purely by coincidence, in that we were sat in the foyer of ExCel, and they walked in. After about 20 seconds of umming and ahhhing we decided that there was nothing to lose, and went to introduce ourselves. This was amazing, and they were great guys, although they couldn’t talk for long because they were running late in preparation for Kevin’s keynote speech, and for the later live filming of Diggnation.

The Diggnation filming began at 7:30pm, and lasted for an hour. This was fantastic to see, and a great experience. Kevin & Alex basically got rock-star treatment, arriving on stage to cheering, applause and blaring music. One thing I noticed was that Diggnation had actually filled the ‘Showcase Stage’ at FoWA more than Kevin’s Keynote speech about lessons learnt from setting up Digg and Pownce, which said something about the popularity of this particular podcast! The ‘episode’ was great, and they were very good, managing and entertaining the crowd, as well as doing what they were there to do.

Photos from the day can be found on my Flickr here, and on Alex Muller’s here