What’s Next For Web Apps: Building the Next Flickr

The second day started off with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch zipping through a host of up-and-coming as well as going-down-in-flames startups, and discussing their strengths and weaknesses. He started off his presentation with a catchy anecdote – that PlentyOfFish generates $300,000 a month just through Google AdSense – to keep the audience on the edge of their seats and noting every word that escaped his mouth.

He was a pretty quick so it was a bit tough to write everything down – besides, I was there to listen more than take notes :) – but here’s what I could grab from his slides:

Attributes of Winners:

• passion
• doing something extraordinary (Purple Cow)
• Removing Serious Fiction (1-800-FREE411)
• Great Founder Dynamics
• Never Raised Big Money, or raised it after they won
• Prefect revenue model not required

Attributes of Losers:

• Poor Founder / Team Choices
• Lifestyle / Ego of entrepreneurs
• Raised too much money
• Over business-planned
• Forgot about scaling (Friendster)

What Server Platform?

• PHP
• RubyOnRails
• Java (serious apps)
• .Net/ActiveX (no firefox)
• Adobe Apollo, brings flash/ajax apps to desktop w/o browser
• Desktop hybrid
• Flash (growing)
• XUL/XAML (interesting)

Market Saturation, Avoid:

• social networking
• social bookmarks
• video
• photos
• blogging/podcasting platforms
• portals/homepages
• feed readers

Big Potential:

• platforms
• desktop apps
• office efficiency
• cloud storage (Microsoft, Google)
• identity
• developer tools
• market destruction (FREE411 has 3% of $8bil market)
• enterprise (consumers had VoIP, blogs, IM, online storage, etc. before corporations did)

During the short Q&A, I managed to grab these snippets:

• email space still interesting (Yahoo! allows POP-in)
• oDesk better than eLance
• ads are annoying; what’ll happen in the future?

Here are 4 choice slides from his Mike’s deck:
     

 
The State, Future & Business of Passion-Centric Online Communities

Ted Rheingold of Dogster and Catster

I had no idea what to expect from this presentation, but it proved to be one of the most interesting. Dogster recently secured $1 million in funding – which the NYT thinks indicates we’re in a bubble but on the contrary, I think we’re witnessing an understanding from investors of the potentials in targeting the niche.

Ted was an animated presenter full of amusing quotes and a clear passion for his company – a passion without which none of his websites would have grown. He shared a collage of websites that exude a similar aura, including ClubMom, Babysites, Teachade, Vampirefreaks, StuffOnMyCat, and the one which got a ton of laughs – CatsThatLookLikeHitler. Some of these are just “digital doritos” (his words, but I love that phrase!) and many may gawk at such communities, figuring the appeal to be miniscule – and perhaps proportional to the number of people on the internet, they are. But as any seasoned entrepreneur will be quick to point out to a skeptic who says a 1% or 2% ownership in a deal is worthless, if the whole is huge, then even a tiny share can mean a lot. Figure there are 1 billion people on the internet. If even just 0.01% of them are interested in your niche hobby, you’ve got a potential 100,000 viewers. Another choice quote from Ted:

Dogster and Catster pages are like personalizing a high school locker

To gauge the appeal of a site, forum activity is a pretty good indicator. Also note what terminology sites use to appeal to their visitors. In the case of Vampirefreaks, there are no “groups”, but “cults”. And it’s not a “shopping cart,” it’s a “coffin.”

 
14 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Building a Web App

Ryan Carson, one of the producers of this conference, got up and spoke about “14 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Building a Web App.” At least Ryan’s presentation should be online soon, so let me just list the points:

1. Work with people in the same time zone.
2. One user database – if you have multiple apps consider this.
3. One e-commerce system – if you have multiple apps consider this as well.
4. Don’t have your back end guy do front end stuff and vice versa.
5. Obsess about the copy on your site – communicate clear messages through the text on your website.
6. Work with a top notch hardware partner.
7. Don’t cut corners.
8. Measure, measure, measure more – how well you app is doing, how are people using it and all other statistics including; web visitors, sign ups, logins, active users, paying users and staying users.
9. You’re not done when you launch.
10. Tea-spoons – stay on top of the little things and make sure they are getting done.
11. Quick tips – provide contact details and logos for the press, use monthly CSV files for invoices, add an about us page and make contact easy.
12. Add tons of stuff to your FAQs.
13. Be nice to nasty customers.
14. Tips from the pros – here he gives tips from other pros in the industry.

 
Designing The Next Generation of Web Apps

The final presentation worth sharing a little about was by Google UI guru Jeff Veen. Referencing key economic tipping points in history such as Henry Ford’s assembly line, the industrial revolution with huge investments followed by the depression but lasting change, and the Netherlands tulip frenzy of the 1700s where at one point people were paying as much as 1 years’ salary for a single bulb, Veen believes we’ve seen the huge investment and bust phases which has created the fundamental change in this business, and we’re now entering the correction and lasting change phases.

The impact of “Web 2.0″ has predominantly been on design, and hence a benefit for the users. “Design” of course refers not just to the visual (typography, color, etc.), but interactivity and information architecture. There is a strong element of giving up control – historically designers had full control but now we’re seeing this control being passed on to the users. Veen encourages:

Use visual design competency to build trust with users, empowering them to control their data … and ultimately to control their experience.

Trust your users and make them your peer. Ah. There’s also a shift in thought from “page-based design” on the web to “application design” on the web, and from an “I am the designer” mindset to a “let’s collaborate” mentality. These can be realized through Interaction Design, where new techniques such as AJAX allow greater fluidity in experience. There are four key components to this fluidity: discoverability, recoverability, context, and feedback. Discoverability is making finding stuff easy – such as Panic Goods’ elegant shopping cart interface. Recoverability says that actions should be without cost – catch errors before they happen, such as not making users click through in order to discover a username has been taken or a password is incorrect. Context means to visualize the process flow for the user, providing real-time feedback. And Feedback refers to showing how the system will respond immediately – in the past a button was presented, clicked, and the next page tells them what happened. Check out MeasureMap for an example of good feedback.
The third and final component of this design evolution has to do with Information Architecture. Blending editorial content with participation creates an experience in and of itself, while at a high level tagging creates an experience just through the data.

Veen notes that there’s a bit of “amateurization” going on in design, but this is helping facilitate an architecture of participation. As Clay Shirky notes:

Weblogs fix the inefficiencies traditional publishers are paid to overcome, and in a world where publishing is that efficient, it is no longer an activity worth paying for.

The next step is turning the users into experts themselves. Keep an eye on FlySpy, FareCast, and TripHub as examples of this.

Jeff’s slides

Check out my Flickr set on the event and surrounding activities.

Other blogs covering the event:

• CenterNetworks
• GroupThink
• Mark Seremet
• Dennis Eusebio p1, p2

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.

4. Should I buy a Mac or a PC? Should I buy a laptop or desktop?

Both Macs and PCs are used and supported on campus, and most students have PCs, although a rising number (about 30%) have Macs. Nonetheless, Residential Computing actually recommends Macs over PCs, because we’ve found them easier to support, and more importantly far less susceptible to viruses and network break-ins. Essentially all security problems here, which often result in network disconnection, are on Windows machines—see the security section for more detail. Those who favor PCs point out that more software is available on this platform, and most computing in non-academic contexts is done on PCs. A majority of commonly used public computers are Macs, with the balance being PCs and enclaves of Linux/Unix machines.

(bolding is mine, of course) What I find amusing is not just the blatant plug for Macs, but the usage figure – 30%!? This is the premier university in the heart of startup central, Silicon Valley, VC-land, whatever you want to call it. Nurturing a future generation of entrepreneurs on an as yet little-used platform globally could have some interesting consequences. Of course, it’s nice just to see great deals being passed out to the students!

NYT has a special on this beautiful part of earth where my uncle has lived for the past, oh, 10 or so years? Finally getting a chance to visit. Can’t wait!

Oops, gotta run – “Quicktime in the Music Industry” is now starting :)