At the Future Of Web Applications (FOWA)

The first impression: it was more about the past of web applications than the future.

It was great to see people like Chris Wilson, the man behind Explorer,or Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP. But you don´t go to a seminar with such an advance title to see that. You expect ideas, risk and creativity. And this edition was more about poster children and tribute to the all timers than envisioning the future.

And it was kind of painful to see sales presentations (the sponsors)with absolutely no interest what so ever. You don´t pay to have to listen to presentations you would never pay attention to. But you had, since there was no WiFi during the whole seminar.

Regarding the networking, since there was no WiFi the chances shrunk a lot. As a whole, the organization was poor.

But lets get to the good stuff. Lesson learned and ideas:

- Michael Arrington, Mr. TechCrunch, could only be an internet product. 100%. He is the WeeGee 2.0

- The Visitor becomes Customer becomesCommunity Member. Amen.

- Compete on ideas, not resources

- Compete on implementation, not on ideas.

- Nice concept: a 2 pizzas team (6-8 people; well, 4-5 if from The Cocktail ... actually in our case it would be a 2 six-pack team)

- What does move people to online sharing?

- Khoi Vinh, designer from the NYT,was the best speaker. Clear and precise ideas that teach you how to do things.

- Traditional media uses narrative design; the web must be conversational design.

- "It is online" vs. "It is the web"

- Grids are fun but tedious

- Inspiring: two really young swedes passing by showed Twingly. Any kind of data representation is the future.

- We will try theOpen ID at La Coctelera soon.

- Last.fm gave a great presentation and workshop. Stay tuned!

- We all know the poster children: flickr, digg, last.fm, ... but they are one in a million, and there are much more lessons to be learned from smaller start-ups with bigger problems. Which are similar to the ones that my clients, for instance, might face. That´s something me and many other people missed: let´s start talking about the real web, not the top percentil.

- Just before the seminar we launched the new La Coctelera, the main spanish blog platform. New user profile, improved post editor, tags, new channels, etc. And it was good to see that we are on the right track.

- Some blogs are better than their owners.

I will post the best presentations the moment they become available.

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