Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Highlights from the Future of Web Apps, Day 1

AJAX is roller skates for the web – Bruce Sterling

As part of my reconneissance trip to the Bay Area over the past two weeks, I attended the Future of Web Apps workshop hosted by Carson Systems at the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts Theater, just across the street from the Presidio where George Lucas consolidated his ILM empire last year. The sold-out two-day event played host to a who’s who list from the web services frontier, and it was great to finally see the personalities behind the headlining ideas and websites. I think it was Michael Arrington of TechCrunch who curiously noted at the top of the second day that “Web2.0″ was not mentioned even once during the entire first day (and as far as I can recall, at all throughout the entire conference). The presentations were professional and to the point, spanned a healthy range from being inspirational to intellectual, and clearly showed why most if not all of the cool internet services and application ideas come from this concentrated area of California and not, for example, from the orthopraxical culture (*caugh* Japan *caugh*) across the ocean.

So let me share some highlights. There’s a lot from each presentation that I will be leaving out for brevity’s sake, but here are the take-aways that were of personal interest. Be sure to check out the list of other blogs covering the event – you’ll find the list at the end of the Day 2 post. If a presenter has their slides online, you’ll find a link to it at the end of each snippet as well.

 
Emerging Age of Who

Dick Hardt of Sxip started off the two-day workshop with a brief discussion on the “Emerging Age of Who”. Numerous web-services require our login information and it’s starting to be annoying having to enter the same information every time. Microsoft Passport tried to alleviate this issue, but few liked the idea of a single entity – let alone Microsoft – maintaining so much personal information.

In light of this, Dick believes we’re entering a personal information era he calls “Identity 2.0” and likes to categorize solutions to problems into three segments: vitamins – which everyone should take but are tough to sell; painkillers – which are easy to sell; and viagra – which gives people an ability they didn’t have before (or regain it, as the case may be :). Dick proposes InfoCard as part of a solution to the growing identity verification issue. InfoCard provides a user centric, single account, click-through registration process which, if done right, is a painkiller for the people and a vitamin for service providers like Google (it may not profit them directly, but the potential ubiquity and decentralized image keeps Google in positive light ala Passport). OpenID was another service he discussed.

The most interesting aspect to this identity verification was perhaps the realization that there’s another element to credibility that gets built over time as we use certain services extensibly – the element of reputation. The ability to transfer our “karma” or reputation from other sights such as eBay, Amazon, or Slashdot could help propel adoption of any user-centric ID platform.

 
Digg

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, was next and shared his rags-to-riches story behind this now 1 million+ user-submitted/voted content service. Kevin started with just $2,000 and a project spec. He hired a developer through eLance at $10/hr, opted for open source technologies such as LAMP, stuck with a basic utilitarian design, and had it all hosted for just $99/mo. In launching, he targeted a core audience of passionate users, which allowed him to initially focus on limited functionality (and not be distracted with feature gloat). The user base was highlighted extensively – the podcast diggnation an example of this.

Other feature decisions included creating tools for self-expression while staying away from “me too”s such as tags. Simple and rewarding one-click processes (digg, bury, #1) also proved important. I would say the most interesting comment was his initial desire not to destroy the garbage, such as trolling comments and negative postings – in Kevin’s words, “users just love to say they hate things,” and not policing these turned out to be a good move.

Digg is also making good use of the vast amounts of user submission and click-through data – check out labs.digg.com for a variety of ways to view real-time visualizations of the back-end. The cool flash visualizations are courtesy of Stamen Design.

Speaking of back-end, scalability quickly became an issue and Kevin recommended reading “Inside LiveJournal’s Backend” for anyone encountering scalability issues. Rather than relying on system administrators or self-proclaimed web-developers, hiring experienced DBAs was one of the best decisions he’s made.

It’s interesting to compare the Digg top 10 vs. say YouTube’s top 10. Because digging content essentially means one is endorsing it, the user/content association keeps questionable content off Digg’s lists.

Back to Digg’s early days, Kevin and the eLance developer were the only two working on the site for the first 4 months. Only after receiving $50k from a friend did Kevin hire his second partner, followed by a CEO, 3 full time PHP, and finally expand the operations group.

 
5 Minutes of Fame

There was an intermission where a few groups had a chance to promote and demonstrate their newest offerings. I would say the most interesting was from Adobe, who demoed their Apollo platform – a way to compartmentalize interactive web-content into a stand-alone application. You have to see it to understand the benefits really. Check it out.

 
10 Things You Didn’t Know About RSS

Steve Olechowski of Feedburner shared some observations from running his feed aggregator service. I’ll just list the interesting ones:

• 10-15% of podcast feeds are video
• he found no correlation between feed subscriptions and click-through rates
• more text in a feed = more traffic!
• podcasts, having reached the mass/consumer level (thanks to the iPod), are more evenly distributed across categories than are text feeds
• RSS has become bigger than blogs
• people, and companies, must realize the RSS audience is different from the HTML/page readers. Therefore marketing and advertising strategies should be approached differently

(At this point thanks to my jetlag, I passed out during Carl Sjogreen’s presentation on building-up Google Calendar – doh! Be sure to read the other blogs if you’re interested.)

 
User Driven Content – Is It Working?

Mike Davidson of Newsvine shared some bits on whether all this freely submitted content was leading anywhere. For those of you thinking of starting your own niche service focused on user driven content should take note of a few aspects which are not working, notably:

• building services which require user-generated content to get to square one
• trying to buy communities, such as TagWorld has essentially done
• building social networks for the sake of social networks. SNs should not be the core of your service.

That said, what is working?

• letting users do as they please ala MySpace and Mixi (Mixi is my addition; nobody at the workshop seemed to know what Mixi is. Sad. I have a brief post coming up on this observation.)
• following the Dunbar principle, which states that the ideal size for a group is under 150.

As would be expected in a topic like this, there were a number of open-ended questions, such as the uncertainties in the future of rights and policies, and what legitimate ways there were to compensate people for their contributions. However, “little media” is clearly starting to standup on its own, and user-generated/contributed news vs the established news networks is showing some parallels to the OSS vs Microsoft challenge.