Carsonified’s Future of Web Apps, Miami, was held February 29th, 2008 at the Miami Carnival Performing Arts Center (actually, there were tutorials the day before, and a beach party the following day, but I missed those events).

Future of Web Apps, or FOWA for short, has been held before in London and San Francisco, and this was the first time it was held on the East Coast. FOWA brings together a who’s who of Web 2.0 technorati to tackle general themes of interest revolving around where the Web is going. Ryan Carson, chief of Carsonified, lays out those themes and his guests tackle them in a series of talks. Getting inside thoughts from many of those who have made Web 2.0 successful is interesting, but even better is the discussion that goes on outside of the talks in the hall-ways. I found these to be inspiring and reaffirming of many of the practices, ideas, and goals we have with BuildingWebApps.com and beyond.

In Miami, Carson’s big themes were Iteration, Speed, and Openness. In many ways, the talks boiled these themes down to the sound byte of “get something out there quickly, small and simple, wash, rinse, repeat (and throw in an API to ‘set the data free’)”.

I’ll try to capture some highlights. From a developer point of view, the sessions were generally, well, general, so those looking for deep technical insight probably didn’t find it in the single session track. From a “meet some of Web 2.0’s current active drivers” viewpoint, it was a good place to mingle.

Kathy Sierra: Creating Passionate Users

Kathy Sierra, the keynote speaker, I recalled from her days in the game development world. She addressed the general question “Why are we here?” (meaning, “we” the audience). She proceeded to tackle a variety areas that should concern the audience in “the future,” all centering around the idea that what “we” should be doing is creating passionate users (of our products indirectly, most specifically of what users can do with our products, and what they can do with one-another). Ultimately, her point was that we should facilitate users getting together offline as well as on, and use our understanding of “meet”-space (my pun intended) to key in on important behavioral motivators.

Sierra is a strong advocate of enabling users to “kick ass”, and touched on how to create “hi-rez” user experiences that get people quickly above the “suck threshold” and nearing the “passion threshold”. She reminded the audience that it isn’t about the tools we create, but how the tools are used. Driving toward a “telepathy-driven design” mentality, in which the user experience becomes one of “it’s as if the app could read my mind” is one goal.

Overall, Sierra’s talk was inspirational in keeping focused on the user, and keeping the user engaged, happy, and successful.

Matt Mullenweg: The Architecture of WordPress

Matt Mullenweg of Automattic (makers of WordPress, Akismet, and more) highlighted his thoughts on scaling from multiple angles (platforms, business, community, and teams). This was a wide ranging talk, of which there were a few technical tidbits.

WordPress has continued to see high growth over the last six months, but amazingly operates on a relatively small numbers of servers. Mullenweg broke down one WordPress configuration as:

1. Two load-balancing machines, running the Pound load balancer, Whackamole virtual IP manager, and Spread messaging toolkit
2. Two hefty database servers running MySQL
3. Three web servers using a well-configured Apache setup

WordPress makes heavy use of its hyperdb technology, puts everything into Subversion that does onto a server (all configuration and OS files), keeps things stateless, and uses a lot of memcached.

Mullenweg touched on scaling community and talks more about it on his blog.

With regards to scaling the business, he indicated that their attempts to have subscription levels didn’t work so well, particularly since most of their growth was on the side of readers, not bloggers. They ended up going with a specialized advertising model that only shows ads to specific users when visiting permanent pages, or if the user only occasionally views the site. Interestingly, in a show of favoritism to FireFox users, they never show ads to users of FF.

Mullenweg finished with some tips of how he is scaling the team and the five things he looks for when hiring: 1) passion for the space; 2) personality fit; 3) ability to learn (curiosity); 4) familiarity with technologies; and 5) taste.

Tantek Celik, Brian Oberkirch, and Joseph Smarr: The Future of Social Networks

Celik, Oberkirch, and Smarr gave a set of interconnected talks around some of the core building blocks for the next wave of social applications. In the large, these were RSS, Creative Commons licensed content, OpenID, and oAuth. Together, it is possible to tie together many interaction modes, across a variety of services such as email, Twitter, Flickr, last.fm, or other specific Social Networks.

Of particular interest to those creating sites that create/use user profile information, Celik gave a nice primer on sharing profile information through the hCard microformats work he has spearheaded. If you aren’t familiar with the microformats efforts, this is definitely something worth checking out.

Profile information can be tied together via hCard (which describes “people” information), >XHTML Friends Network (which covers “relationship” information), and linking profiles’ information together across the net using XFN’s rel me="me" attribute on your links. This is called profile equivalency and Google’s crawlers, among others, use these to build the the data for the OpenSocial Social Graph API.

Key Lessons

A variety of speakers shared key lessons they learned as they built their products, and these lessons drive how they see “the future.” Here are some highlights:

Blaine Cook, from Twitter, emphasized the need to simplify (YAGNI) and listen to users versus your developers, and encouraged everyone to check out their Ruby distributed queue server Starling.

Leah Culver from Pownce shared some of the missteps they made introducing their APIs. Their first API was not well conceived, didn’t provide access to enough data, and just didn’t succeed with developers. For 2.0, they are spending time with developers, greatly opening up the data available to applications, permitting key data uploads (file transfers, note posting, etc.), supporting oAuth, and providing a developer showcase. Culver indicated that all of these efforts are also in support of the interoperability and key building blocks discussed earlier.

Emily Boyd from Remember the Milk gave a really great talk on the evolution if her To Do List service and the amazing amount of work two people can do who are passionate about a space. She is a fun example of a computer person adopting “cool” technologies or “workarounds,” “because they are cool,” and in this case, doing so at the benefit of her customers. One example was in pushing as much into client-side Javascript processing as possible, adopting Google’s Gears offline framework. Another novel feature was unofficial integration of task management with GMail (where no real API exists) through the use of the likes of greasemonkey.

Cal Henderson of Flickr gave one of his trademark talks, equal parts informative and good fun. At FOWA, Henderson focused on automation, monitoring, and incrementalism. At Flickr, they keep releases small and rapid, thereby keeping the amount that can go wrong as small as possible. His book, Building Scalable Web Sites covers many of these techniques and suggestions.

Gary Vaynerchuck of wine library tv rounded out the day with his inspirational talk. He talked of the creation of his vlog, but most importantly, about the need to be passionate about your community (and wine!).

Worth it?

Overall, FOWA was a great opportunity to meet and greet many of the folks driving current Web 2.0 darlings, as well as mingle and share ideas with other entrepreneurs trying to create the next wave. I’d recommend it if you are looking for events to add to your list of “networking” events, but skip it if you are looking for purely technical information (for that, barcamp is a better choice than FOWA).

Resources

Many of the talks are available online as MP3 and slides

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