Just got back from the Future of Web Apps conference in London. My impressions from this event and also some other events I have attended the last couple of months is that the focus are upon open api’s, open data and open authentication giving a foundation for the internet to become a network of different services loosely joined. Almost all start-ups are built on this foundation and this is not a surprise. More interesting is it to see what strategical positions the already big web companies will take in this landscape.

At the event Dave Morin talked about The Story Behind The Facebook Platform, and the figures he gave was amazing(!). Since the launch of the Facebook Platform on the 24th of may 2007 (kick-off video with Mark Zuckerberg) they have reached:

• 90.000 + developers
• 5000 + apps total
• 100 + new apps a day

Facebook is now the 6th most-trafficked site in the US. They are bigger than eBay, and will (I suppose) soon pass Google(!).

London 2.0
I’ve just attended The Future of Web Apps conference in London.
Here is my impressions and thougts. The program was impressive and with the list of speakers this could not be a boring and non-visionary conference.
Thanks to the Carsons Systems for the conference and program work.

Day one summary (skiped some speakers):

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch talked about start-ups and web companies focusing on how to be successful. I think his bubble 2.0 discussion was interesting focusing on the fact that in 2006 more money was used buying start-ups and web companies than invested with venture capital.

Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency had a presentation about communities. The presentation probably worked well for newbies@communities.

Last.fm with Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavie, gave a brilliant presentation. Interesting topic from the guys was the use of attention data as a foundation for ranking the songs (popularity). They used tag clouds as example and showed us how much more elegant use of attention data is rather than just focusing on traffic etc. It gave me some nice ideas for a project I am working on.

Werner Vogels from Amazon gave a nice presentation focusing on the hosting-service from Amazon. The company has had great success with this service.

Kevin Rose form Digg announced that they intend to support OpenID. Actually this was the most interesting point with the whole presentation, a some what disapointing talk. Maybe I just had too high expectations to this presentation!

Day two summary (skiped some speakers):

Mark Anders from Adobe gave a great presentation, just in my alley :). Use simple tools in an elegant fashion and the geeks are with you. He presented Flex a rich Internet application framwork. I will definitly look more into this interesting technology.

Chris Wilson from Microsoft. I had hopes for a talk around the future of Internet Explorer (MSIE), but Chris’s focus was the past and present and what happend with Microsoft and the web during 2001-2006

Khoi Vinh from New York Times talked about design issues at NY Times. This newspaper is really working hard and develops some pretty nice stuff.

Simon Willison gave an outstanding presentation of OpenID. OpenID may be the solution to web-authentication. It is promising, and several of the big sites out there is now supporting OpenID. Some issues still have to be looked into. Just made a nslookup for larre.myopenid.com and the result was:

P:\>nslookup http://larre.myopenid.com
…
Navn: http://larre.myopenid.com
Address: 67.137.230.67
P:\>

This says me that we might see some issues related to performance. Hope performance will be an issue at some openID articles.

Daniel Applequist from Vodafone gave a presentation about the future of mobile. The presentation may have been interesting for people not so into mobile development.