The best things I learnt at Future of Web Apps (FOWA) 2008..
I'm helping out at FOWA for a couple of days, transcribing highlight versions of the presentations which will be shared on the FOWA Expo content site. Videos and slides from all of the presentations (and more) should be available on the site shortly, check it out - http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content
Anyway, these are some of the best things I've learnt from FOWA over the past couple of days:
(from Kevin Rose) Digg have some big things planned for their recommendation engine:
The Digg recommendation engine identifies topic content as users submit stories to Digg. It compares connections to what Kevin called 'topic buckets' to determine the strength of relationship between users. Digging similar stories clusters users closer together in the recommendation engine, burying stories has the opposite effect - distancing users from each other. This all happens in real time, topic by topic.
Digg plan to broaden the taxonomy of the recommendation engine so that it is not constrained to fixed topic buckets (e.g. sports, technology, politics etc). The aim is to classify data as it is submitted to Digg, picking out keywords (e.g. Manchester United, iPod, Obama) to create very tightly focused micro niches on the fly. From this Digg will eventually support 'dynamic grouping' creating natural communities of like minded people around common subjects of interest.
See from 07.10m to 10.08m on the video above for this part of Kevin's presentation.
(from Blaine Cook) Jabber can be used to create awesome 'push' RESTful APIs
Former Twitter Chief Engineer Blaine Cook talked through a really inventive 'push' RESTful approach.
The properties of the XMPP/Jabber protocol; connections that are persistent, lightweight, asynchronous, bi-directional, HTML mark-up based with a confirmed server identity can be used in conjunction with pub/sub asynchronous messaging to create push RESTful APIs.
This can be used to reduce the wasted effort incurred by clients querying servers for changes (Blaine likened this to a child in a car constantly asking the driver 'are we there yet? are we there yet?').
(from Francisco Tomalsky) Normal users are far more ready for web applications than web professionals realise
Francisco from 280 North shared the moment when he understood that everyday users have already normalised online software far more than most developers and web evangelists realise.
Whilst setting up a computer for a friends father he'd tried to be helpful by installing Thunderbird so that his Yahoo Mail account could be accessed offline. His friends father was confused by this, and simply couldn't grasp how Thunderbird could be useful. When Fransisco offered that the program would allow him to access email when the internet was down he was floored by the question "but when is the internet ever down?"
This really resonated with me; I thought about colleagues in my office, family and friends at home. Nobody I know uses a desktop mail program by choice. Outlook is a necessary evil at work that no one would keep if they were offered the choice of using their Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Hotmail account for business purposes instead.
For mail (and I suspect calendaring) online services are now the norm. Office suites and personal photo editing are going to follow this trend - beyond this it's an open playing field.
(from Simon Wardley) Google's '20% time' is not an HR gimmick - it's a management inovation that creates continuous competative advantage.
Simon's presentation was my personal highlight. If you only watch video from FOWA make sure it's his masterfall waltz through commoditisation and innovation management, supplemented by pictures of ducks, LOL catz and cartoon bunnies being punched!I loved his description of commoditisation as a positive force - "an ugly word for a beautiful process that creates opportunities." He argued that it is commoditisation that allows the constant creation of new 'stuff' through the process of creative destruction. He relayed how the desirable characteristics of an activity change as it goes from being an innovation (expensive, deviation is good, dynamic methods) to being a commodity (lower cost, deviation is bad, defined methods) - even though what it actually is stays the same.
This is what gives organisations an 'innovation paradox': "Adaption (survival today) requires coherence, co-ordination, stability. Innovation (survival tomorrow) requires the replacement of these virtues." Management of simultaneous innovation and commoditisation is required for continued success.
Simon argued, rather effectively I thought, that '20% time' for engineers is Google's approach for balancing this innovation paradox. As such it is not a HR gimmick, but a continuous source of competitive advantage that others need to figure out how to compete with.Succinctly summarised by Simon at the end of his presentation: "the real challenge for the future of web business is actually not technology, its management."
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