The FOWA Expo 2007 is finished and I am just about to go on holiday so I wanted to quickly put down my thoughts on what I think is the Future of Web Apps, after listening to the talks and talking to the exhibitors.
So what is going to be big:
1. Lifestreams - until platforms like Facebook and Twitter open themselves up and allow social network interoperability people will start to create lifestreams aggregating all the content they create in various places. There are lots of companies getting into this area, but my favourite so far is http://rememble.com/ , I had a chat with them and they have only just launched but there site looks great and they have lots of good ideas.
2. Ambient Intimacy : A phrase coined by Leisa Reichelt when talking about presence applications such as Twitter and Jaiku. I think these technolgies will become more mainstream, especially now you can Twitter from Facebook.
3. Mobile Web : As phones get smarter, and developing for them gets easier (?!?) then companies will want to get into the monile scene. In Britain we are well placed to be forrunners in this with providers like Vodaphone and T-moile providing broadband speed mobile internet at a fixed price. Lets face it, if you are out and about with nothing to do, whats the first thing you will reach for - your phone!!!
4. DeDigitilisation : As more of us have a lot our lives digitised (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Wikis), our lives are becoming more intagible, and we become dependent on the internet to get access to our stuff. However printing has become massively cheaper, and companies like Blurb and Moo have arrived, offering to print out our digital lives at a surprisingly reasonable price!. Blurb is my favourite one at the moment - for a mere tenner you can create an 80 page shop quality book (Softcover) of whatever you want - I just ordered one with a bunch of my favourite photos, and it feels really good to have dedigitalised some of my life.
So whats not going to be hot at least int he way we expect??
1. Semantic web - the Tim Berners Lee vision isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon.
We are all selfish at heart, and as a developer, what si the ROI of making my site semantically aware? However companies like Dapper are allowing communities to put a semantic layer over stuff they are intereseted in - essentially creating a semantic folksonomy.
Friday, 5 October 2007
Thursday, 4 October 2007
Twittering
I have been experimenting with microblogging sites such as Twitter and Jaiku for a while, but without really doing it seriously. However yesterday Heidi Pollock mentioned in her talk that Twitter now has a mobile website, so I thought I would give Twitter another go.....Then this morning I was sitting next a guy called Paul Downey who was writting notes on the talk we were in directy into Twitter - I thought what an awesome idea and started to do the same, we ended up exchanging ids and follwing each other on the conference. I thought this is cool - so not only am I getting my notes down somewhere that I can find them again, but I can also see in real time what Paul was thinking/finding interesting. However it got even cooler when I changed track at the conference to watch a talk on presence, but still got the highlights of the talk on my original track because Paul was in ther twittering about it !!! Very cool.
BTW - The talk on presence was really really good - so good in fact I am going to write its own post later on this evening.
BTW - The talk on presence was really really good - so good in fact I am going to write its own post later on this evening.
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!!
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!!
Wednesday, 3 October 2007
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.
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.
Other top tips for the future of web apps: Mobile, Widgets - hopefully I can cover more on those later.
Ctrlspc @ FOWA
Long time no blog, but I'm London today and tomorrow at the Future of Web Apps at the Excel center. I am going to be blogging my thoughts throughout the day, but looks like its going to be a good conference.
More soon.
More soon.
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
Too much choice = too much hassle
At the moment in my team, we have lots of means of group communication: Documentum eRooms, Sharepoint, Drupal blogs, email, group meetings etc. Its true, one size doesn't fit all, and this is one of the reason we have such an arsenal of tools. The problem is, everyone in the team has their favorite tools for doing communicating. I prefer a combination of Drupal and email, but a lot of my colleagues love eRoom (which I really hate!!), and some just like to talk to face to face. This is fine and I truly believe that we should be able to choose the tools that suit us and they we think/work, however we have reached a situation where people have stopped communicating effectively because no one can agree on how we should do it.
The problem is that each of these applications publishes its data to different (often siloed) location, so whilst I might prefer to use Drupal - someone else might want to use eRoom, so everyone has to look in two separate places. Obviously RSS provides a solution to this, all people have to do is subscribe to the various communication feeds in the group and they get all the information delivered to them. This is great, but the problem is that the communications are still siloed. The key to online communication is that it becomes a conversation - currently if I want to comment on someone's post, I still to go to several places to do it.
So far the only technology that is even close to dealing with this is fav.or.it (http://fav.or.it/). They have produced an RSS reader that combines commenting with post retrieval - taking aggregation to the next level and maybe making keeping up with online communication platform independent?
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