10:05am: Leah Culver, Web developer with Pownce. Practical Lessons We Learned. She is the full time developer of Pownce with Kevin Rose (Digg, Revision3). This post was written live at the Future of Web Apps conference in London 2007. These are my notes that I will format better later. Got to get some photos too! Check out Flickr and use the tag FOWA to search.

Pownce was developed over 4 months with an invite only launch.

Developed with Django. But why the choice? Well is a base framework and there is a lot of documentation that’s really easy to work. The code is readable too and also an automatic admin console generated without having to do anything.

Amazon S3 is used for storage, low cost and massive amounts of storage. They wanted to use external storage to reduce maintainance load on the 4 people who founded it.

AIR was used for the dektop app that you can download from pownce.com/download. It’s really easy to develop using existing web technologies, AJAX, JavaScript HTML and Flash.

Completely self funded so no investment and other people dictating some of the dictations.

Leah is the DBA, Developer, JavaScript programmer, she “wears lots of shoes”. Also needed to be dedicated to the project and enjoy it.

She has praised all the open source developers that have made the frameworks etc that they have used. Memcache, apache, Django etc.

She also uses IRC, networking and friends to get help with development rather than locking herself in a room and driving herself crazy.

She goes into describe how that Pownce runs on only 1 database! Well for the mean time anyway.

ALL static pages were cached to save loading times etc.

She spoke about a problem when Kevin (Rose) had 2000 “fans” everytime he wanted to write a note it times out. So Leah made some code to queue the system up so when it had some free time it sent out the 2000 messages.

Don’t put unneeded data on a page. They thought of a stats page that would include a lot of complicated SQL queries and so that would be almost useless info for a social network especially when it is viewed everytime the user logs in. Avoid useless data!

BACKUP! Yes its simple but if you want to roll back your app you need backups.

Take notes of everything, she goes into storing notes with account movements and number of pages visited etc, you can then get stats and graphs and see the site grow.

“Don’t prematurely optimise!”, don’t do work you don’t need to do.

Then it was onto questions as she went so quickly she had 15 minutes left on a 40 minute slot!

Question: Why did it start?
Answer: Leah wanted to just work on a web app from scratch, in particuly sending messages with links, files, events and other bits without using e-mail. Kevin had a similar idea.

Question: How is the API going?
Answer: Surprised so many people want to use the API it will be coming soon

Question: How do you maintain focus on the application as it has so much potential?
Answer: It’s tempting to do anything, but knowing what people will actually use and what the most amount of people will like. Still not really answering the question! hehe

Question: What best practice advice to solo developers? (well not Pownce isn’t entire solo)
Answer: Use IRC channels and talk to friends, use open source and building what other people have previously built before.

Question: How much do you spend on Amazon S3?
Answer: “I don’t know, I don’t track it”, (Great! hehe)

Question: How much money have you spent so far??
Answer: Low 10’s of thousands

Question: What are your concerns with the API?
Answer: Concerned about privacy and also hoping people can actually use it. Also a lot of testing is involved. Also about how handling the extra requests coming from third party apps.

Questions: Is it a good idea to create an API and then build an app on top?
Answer: Absolutely, wish I had thought of it. Completely agree, lesson learnt!

Question: How are you using S3?
Answer: Uploading and downloading from S3 really.

Other questions I couldn’t keep up with! Check out my other posts to see what else is on at the FOWA 2007!

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Well I am here at the developer stage again! But this time I had a lie-in so i missed the introductions! Not asmuch as Mike Arrington did yesterday! Atleast I wasn’t late for my own talk!

I have written about the first talk on a separate post so be sure to check that out. It was more relevant to me so it will prbbaly look like my own notes! Hope its useful.

10:05am: Leah Culver from Pownce talking about lessons she has learnt from launching the app. (In separate post)

11:25am: Dave Morin taling about “The Story Behind the Facebook Platform”. 60 Billion page views a month! 50% of users return every single day! Amazing stats. Twice as many users use Facebook photos then any otherphoto sharing sites combined! Oh and the photos app was developed in a week. Now onto the platform. He has describe the areas you can access, that we all really know already, the left nav, news feed and getting a whole page in Facebook. FBML (Facebook Markup Language) used to help users create an app quickly. Newly launchs FBJS which is the Facebook JavaScript language that keeps the users info safe while keeping all the funtionality your used to. They want developers to harness the 43 Million users that Facebook has. Over 5000 applications built! They are as suprised as anything as less than 3 months ago the Facebook platform launched. 100 new apps a day, 90,000 developers. 80% of users have added a facebook app. Checkout developer.facebook.com. They know people are worried about copy cats and other problems but they are trying to help it.

12:00pm: Wii Time! John and I went back to the Adobe stand to improve out Wii skills! To be honest the speakers today aren’t as relevant to me as they were yesterday so only got about 3-4 more I am going to today. I will keep you posted!

13:00pm: Looking around the expo areas. I will grab some photos from Flickr to show you what it was like. Really great stands. I especailly liked the Widr app. I will be writing a more detailed post about it soon, had a great chat with one of the main guys about how he did his Facebook app, Buddy Atlas (go find it)! I will. If i find it i will add a link to here! But the WiFi here is really dodgey so every few minutes it goes down. Which is a nightmare as I am trying to blog live!!

14:05: The semantic web. The audio from the event will be alot better then anything I can say! (Will be attatched soon!)

14:45; The main Developer of Dopplr explains how he integrates there sites, API’s and creating his own API for his site. Also goes into how he plans to integrate OpenID as he prefers it over the top for Authentication sites including Google, Yahoo and AOL. He used Amazon S3 storage too. Sign up using www.dopplr.com/fowa for a free invite! Pretty positive questions and comments too.

15:25: Picked up more free stuff and missed out on a brand new copy of Windows Vista! But still in the running for an XBox 360!

End of the conference. It was soooo nackering. I hope all my information was useful to you. Mail me for any questions. I am working on a photo gallery too! I will be back next year!

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Firstly how cool was the atmosphere that was in the developer stage at the Future of Web Apps conference in London? It felt almost electric, everyone was excited to see 2 guys get pissed and talk about some technological plus one funny story from “d-i-a-double-g-a-dot-com ” (digg.com).

By the way if you do not subscribe to Diggnation you must go to www.diggnation.com and subscribe! Or go through iTunes! Don’t forget the Totally Rad Show in that too! Another awesome show brought to us but the great guys behind Revision3.

Some photos will be coming!

I am not sure I want to give some of the stories away as some people pay to see it. But what the hell!

The funniest story was the 12 year old who “apparently” hung onto a boeing 737 plane from a short jouney arcoss a part of Russia. How did he breath I hear some of you ask? Well I don’t know. Alex Albrecht (co-host), suggested he might have had scuba gear on. Hehe.

Other news topics included the iPhone hacks, Halo3 launch making$178 Million amungst others. Oh and a marriage proposal fo Alex chucked into the mix!

It is an experience I won’tforget for a while I will be downloading it and making sure I never delete it. I doubt you will see me but I am waving probably in the end credits or the out takes if there are any. But then so are about 1000+ other people!

Anyway day 2 of the FOWA will be coming tomorrow! Send me an e-mail if you are there! ollie[at]techjuicer[dot]com. Coverage will be on TechJuicer, Virtually live and on the scene!

I found this video online from Byte Surgery

Cheers

Ollie

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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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