LIVE! At The Future of Web Apps: Day 1 3rd October 2007

Hello to you!

I am writing live from the Future of Web Apps from the Excel Centre in London, UK on the 3rd and 4th of October. LIVE plus some editing after! Photos coming later when I can get the photos off John and my phones. Don;’t worry they are at least 2mp shots! Just the lighting isn’t that good fro photos.

9:15am: listened to Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) and Om (GigaOm) discussing the future of web apps with Ryan Carson (Carsonified). Mike Arrington was about 15mins late after over sleeping!

10:15am: Currently listening to Steve Sounders, (Yahoo), talking about high traffic websites and how to increase performance, particularaly page load times. Yahoo did a great thing they included a transparent pixel to test the URL cache and checks the response time to see who has an empty cache and who has the image already. Sneaky! but it was only a short test for one day. More detail in another post.
More updates soon!

11:30am: Google Gears: How to take your apps offline. A fairly detailed look into the Google Gears model. Including the SQLite and other items that you get in the just over 500kb download (tiny).

12:10pm: Accesibility, in particular screen readers and looking at how visually imparied people can use web apps. What an insight this was. Showing that the Amazon site is a really really inaccessible website. The other great moment was when he critisised the Yahoo sign up system for not having an accessible version (audio) of the image verification right infront of a high up developer, Steve Sounders (who spoke earlier).

LUNCH!! woo! Picked up a great sandwich and spotted Kevin Rose (Digg). Hoping to have a word with him later. Along with Jay Adelson CEO of Digg and Revision 3 I think.

How many free pens, CD’s and leaflets have i picked up from the Expo???? Also a beta version of Visual Studio 2008, AIR on CD (I know big deal, it saves me having to down load it) which I hope has more materials on too! and lots of other goodies from other areas. Plus got my ass kicked in 4 XBox 360’s hooked up together to have 8 multiplayer on Halo 3! Oh and a Ninentdo Wii too see if I can kick someones ass on that later.

The Adobe stand (as diamond sponsor) have massive TV’s and a speaker that seems to be doing a solid day of talks about AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime. Also Flex and other very quick tutorials and examples.

14:10pm: Danial Burka, Creative Director of Digg and Pounce. Interpreting Feedback. More to follow. Great talk, couldn’t help but think it was maybe more of a plug for Digg and Pounce! But saying that the information was very useful. Plus later or tomorrow we have Leah Culver the only full-time developer of Pownce. So more pluggin possibly, me writing about it is doing the same i know!

14:40pm: Matt Mullenweg (PhotoMatt) co-founder of Wordpress. Talking about the architecture behind the Wordpress.com site, scaling etc. Interesting bit about a really simple blog setup and how brief requirements including software and hardware. Then went on to talk about hopw they were expreimenting with advertising on Wordpress.com hosted blogs. Also how he created the VIP program where users can pay and then scale their blogs by allowing plugins and external widgets to be used. But the DNS comes from sites like CNN so that the servers are hosted with Wordpress, but you don’t see it. Thursday 9pm at “The Old Crown” in London so be there! I can’t as I will be on the train back home. :-(. Other info I have gatheredWordpress.com doesn’t use their own servers. There is a datacentre down Matt’s street so that is where they chose to host their wordpres sites. Over about 4000+ databases! Also no comment on how Askimet works! hehe.

15:45pm: Zoho. I really wanted to see this presentation after finally deciding that I didn’t want to use Microsoft office as to me it was a waste of money as I only use about 20% of the functionality for each of the products. So I thought why not use an online slightly stripped down version. So I looked at Google’s Docs and Spreadsheet applications. But I also already knew about Zoho and that it has had some good writeups. So I thought while they are here I would have a look. The tools are really good, looks really simple to use and right after this i will be singing up for an account! You should too if you haven’t already!

16:50pm: Future of funding. Too full to get in!! So for most of the 40minutes John and I played on one of the Nintendo Wii’s that Adobe supplies!

17:45pm: The one I have been waiting for, except the live Diggnation of course! Kevin Rose talking about Digg and Pounce. He will be on in a few minutes. Just charing the laptop up! Just listening to a guy from Microsoft who has 10mins to talk about mashus and the Virtual Earth SDF, Popfly Alpha and the express editions of their Web Developer and SQL Server. Windows Live Alerts get Windows Live Messenger messages when your blog updats, like a subscription service, I do this with Zong. Now Kevin Rose doing the Keynote for Day 1. Tips he has learnt.

He worked full time at Tech TV before starting digg in his free time. He basically says he paid for it himself until he needed more cash! $3000 to launch Digg.

Bought a PHP book and from then decided someone else should code! A big mistake he made was not planning for sucess and scaling. A couple of months to build. Reanted servers. Hebought brand new servers butwas a mistake when he was given £10000 to spend. But he needed a rented server with VNC, Remote desktop or KVM management. using EV1 servers. Ring in ot reboot boxes etc.

Digg built on LAMP. Revision3 built on Pthon, MySQL and Apache.

Now onto making money: Adsense, Pro accounts with Pownce, alot of money in the first few months of launching pro accounts.

Kevin then shows Digg 1.0 design and its ameteur but still Web 2.0-esque. “If you use bevel and emboss (Photoshop) you need a designer.”

Features that worked with Digg: Import addressbook, Add Friends next to every icon on the site, “Shout It!”. “E-mail a story” more popular then it sounds! He descibes how his mum knows the Firebird symbol and would clikc on it rathar than any other tools.

Connect users after registration not during. “Borrow from the best”, no need to reinvent the wheel, use what is out there! Scaling, Memchached,

Other he/they have used”Hire a DBA to review architechture”, Google Analytics, custom stats etc from their own databases, makes custom admin page. Nagios, sends text when server goes down! Great tool. Blog to users and get participation from users. Ask for suggestions and feedback politely.

Talking aboout the HD DVD contraversy after the C&D. Regrets deleting it and then wanted to link to the C&D fax scan.

When your wrong, admit it, read your support e-mail.

Into question time. Question asking if Digg and Pownce communites can combine. Basically saying no as Pownce will be closed network plus they are slightly differenct in the way you interact with.

“What you doing next year?” Replies saying he should have said don’t do 3 startups! Just start with 1.

“Any tips on security?” People used to gain access to toher peoples accounts. Guy offered to help out with secrutiy by trying to find holes. Got help from guy in Google security (as a friend). wouldn’t recommned asking for help. Find somone you trust to help.

Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg and Revision3!!) asks when did Digg change from a project to a company. Said it was when servers crashed due to overload. Knew he was onto something.

Plugs the Live Diggnation Recording!

That is all from Kevin and probably from me until tomorrow morning!

Photos will come soon!

Come back tomorrow for more from the Future of Web Apps!

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