First of all, big congrats to the Carsonified team! The whole event was perfectly organised. The wifi could have been better, but hey… it was free so it didn’t really matter. In this post, I want to talk about my experiences and interpretations of FOWA, feel free to comment or react where I’m wrong.
DAY 1
At the registration desk everybody got a goodiebag, a badge and some stickers. Kevin Rose (digg) gave the first speech about “The Future of News”. I expected more of it, but overall it was ok. He talked about digg.com, the things they’ve done wrong and are going to change in the future. Next speaker: Edwin Aoki (AOL). He talked about web apps in general. Developers visions, customers visions, etc.
Joe Stump (digg) and Blaine Cook (Twitter) talked about the difference between Ruby On Rails and PHP, speed, scaling issues, etc. Great session! In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter in which language you’re app is made. Once you’ve got scaling issues, you’re in trouble. Blaine told the crowd that twitter sometimes has 9000 database request per second!! Crazy!
For me, Stefan Fountain (Soocial) should have won the price of “best presentation” titled “How the future of the mobile web is going to change everything”. It was a good subject, well presented and funny where possible. The future of the mobile web is not about a device like a mobile phone, but about being mobile. Next session: Ron Richards (Revision3) about “Bringing Internet Television to the Masses”. Not inspiring at all. He talked about his youth and his passion about tv. I expected much more from this session. His version of the ‘future’ of television is already here today: download podcasts, movies, youtube, series, etc right on your tv… Dude: wake up! :)
Ben Huh (I Can Has Cheez Burger) talked about how to keep your community happy and about keeping it simple. Great session too! His site has more visitors than you can imagine and it’s all really simple: wordpress.com account, google analytics, etc. Next stop: Francisco Tolmasky (280 North) about building Desktop Caliber Web Applications with Objective-J and Cappuccino. He only got like 20 minutes to talk which is sad, because I really like his talk and the subject. Then, FOWA’s worst session: Crick Waters (BT). Stupid subject, stressed out bloke, worst slides ever, first guy with a pc on stage and he even made jokes about it… weirdo :)
Overall, day 1 was really good. With intresting speakers and some great sessions! The party at Fox (sponsored by Media Temple) was a bit lame, but I guess everybody wanted to be awake on day two so it stayed quite calm.
(yeah I know … I was a bit behind on the beer :P)
DAY 2
Microsoft had a booth with some Xbox consoles and a Surface. Played with it for a moment, really cool thing! First session of the day: Tim Bray (Sun Microsystems) scared the crowd a bit by telling everyone bad times are ahead (with the economy, etc), but that it’s a good time to do a startup. Great session! Next: Adam Gross (Salesforce.com) didn’t intrest me at all. “Cloud computing” is too far from my bed, sorry dude ;). Next session: Simon Wardley about Innovation, the future and why nothing is ever simple. He had a good metaphor about electricity and how new things become old things we only remember when they are not there anymore. Great topic! Too bad that bloke from Soocial talked about exactly the same the day before. Therefore it was a bit boring for some people.
After that, we went to see Bret Taylor (FriendFeed). Another great session! He talked mostly about his app (friendfeed.com), which is brilliant. FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. Next up: Jason Calacanis, Tom Nixon, Tony Lucas and Jeff Barr in two two-by-two sessions. Jason has some great visions and seems like an interesting guy. He had some great slogans like: “It’s ok to be average, but not in my company.“. Next session: “How to build a desktop app for your web app” by Jeremy Baines (Howard Baines). He should be awarded with the best keynote: shiny, glossy and fancy :)
Dave Morin (Facebook) gave everyone a quick introduction about Facebook Connect. Seems like a great service. Basically, the guys from Facebook are telling sites like OpenID and OpenSocial to f*ck off. FOWA ended with session from Mark Zuckerberg. If you don’t know him: about 4 years ago he started Facebook.com which made him the youngest billionaire on earth and possibly the youngest self-made billionaire ever. He didn’t actually gave a session like the other speakers, but had an on-stage chat with Ryan (Carsonified). I didn’t learn much from that session but found it quite nice. Two interesting people talking can’t be bad eh.
Last but not least: Diggnation! The one and only podcast I always try to see. With Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) and Alex Albrecht (actor, gamer, …). They recorded their weekly podcast live on stage which was awesome. Free beers by Google and the atmosphere was superb!
In overall, the London Future of Web Apps 2008 was great! Although my employer (These Days) payed the bill (which was great, thank you E&G!), I would do it all over and pay for it myself! Make sure to check out the sessions video’s and slideshows if you’re interested. There’s only one thing to say anymore: FOWA… see you next year!
