Thoughts on FOWA day one

Well I was a bit dubious about coming to FOWA. Simon had been to a few conferences this year that overall he didn't really find very useful, and to be honest, for a conference about the future of web apps, their attendees "networking" site was really rubbish!!!
However, I arrived with an open mind, and kicked off the day with a bit of Halo 3 at the Microsoft lounge. Having established that this wasn't going to be a stuffy Enterprise 2.0 conference, and it was going to be a fun web2.0 conference I relaxed a bit.
I noted before going that most of the attendees were from little web2.0 startup companies, and apart from the sponsors of the shows I reckon I was the only attendee from a big corporation , let alone from a pharmaceutical company - so I felt a bit like an undercover agent , posing as a Flex developer!!! The upside of this was that nobody was trying to sell me anything, and I found that people, even the exibitors really just wanted to tell you what they were up to , and maybe get some feedback!
My highlight from yesterday was a talk by Daniel Burka, who was talking about how to implement changes in a community site like DIGG, in a way that really engages and placifies the community. I think he had some really great advice, and actually out shone his boss Kevin Rose, who presented later in the day.
One final point to note - like any cool technology conference, everyone was sporting their swanky MacBooks - but I was very surprised to see that Microsoft were using them on their stand to showcase Silverlight!!!!!!
More later on today!!

Finally got a sneak preview of fav.or.it

http://fav.or.it/

I have been really looking forward to getting my hands on fav.or.it, which looks poised to solve the annoying problem, that you can subscribe to a comments feed for a blog, but these comments don't come to your RSS reader with any information about what post they relate to.

Fav.or.it I am pleased to say solves this, not only are you alerted when there are new comments on a post, but you can post a comment to a post from fav.or.it directly. GREAT.

BUT and I think it is a big but, the guy from fav.or.it that I spoke to admited, that they aren't really going for a RSS reader as such, more a platform for mashing up your RSS feeds and producing what they call "slices", streams of posts on a specific theme.

This in itself is fine, but it isn't "Brain Dead Simple" - the interface looks nice - but it isn't intuitive and the concepts behind mashing up web feeds to create "slices" are quite obscure.

What I really wanted to see was google reader but with comment support.

That said - they have been hiding away an amazing feature that I am surprised they haven't made more noise about :

Like many other similar RSS mashup tools, fav.or.it claims that it can learn what you like and suggest similar content. I am always skeptical about this because normally it involves maintaining a list of key terms that I am interested in....

However fav.or.it have put some thought in and developed a system that monitors the time you spend reading about subjects and maintains your interest profile based on this "passive interest".

Without seeing it for myself I cant say that this works, but it does seem like an elegant solution to a problem that needs addressing, and it is the reason that I would be prepared to put the effort into learning and setting up the interface for my use.

So, not the tool that I was looking for, but definitely one to look into.

"Web Apps Should be Braindead Simple"

Om Malick said in the opening discussion at FOWA that his top tip for the future of web apps is that "Web Apps should be braindead simple". I couldn't agree more in this respect, there are so many tools out there that do similar things - but the tool that I choose will be the easiest to use, the one that has the finest focus on the problem.. Its always worth remmbering the "one size doesn't fit all rule" make a web app to do one thing and one thing well.

Other top tips for the future of web apps: Mobile, Widgets - hopefully I can cover more on those later.