FOWA Expo 2007

I’ve been last week at Future of Web Apps in London, UK. People from Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Digg, Ajaxian.com, WordPress.com, Mozilla, YCombinator, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plazes, Dopplr, Stamen Design, and Dapper among others were there to give talks and show their products. Loved to meet new people and had really interesting conversations. Awesome presentations too.
My first time in London with time to really appreciate the city so yeah, I took some time to explore the city life and that was pretty cool.

My flickr sets are here and here. 

Ok, I promised some friends I would post about the con itself..

This were the talks I saw and found interesting enough to comment:

Steve Souders, (Yahoo!) High Performance Websites

Steve Souders gave a compelling talk about how to make a website faster. I ended up buying his book at the O’Reilly stand outside.

Rule 1: Make Fewer HTTP Requests
Rule 2: Use a Content Delivery Network
Rule 3: Add an Expires Header
Rule 4: Gzip Components
Rule 5: Put Stylesheets at the Top
Rule 6: Put Scripts at the Bottom
Rule 7: Avoid CSS Expressions
Rule 8: Make JavaScript and CSS External
Rule 9: Reduce DNS Lookups
Rule 10: Minify JavaScript
Rule 11: Avoid Redirects
Rule 12: Remove Duplicate Scripts
Rule 13: Configure ETags
Rule 14: Make Ajax Cacheable

Dion Almaer, (Ajaxian.com) How to take your app offline

Basically Mozilla vs Google implementation of offline persistence and synchronization stuff. Common effort to make a standard way of doing this.

Robin Christopherson, (AbilityNet) The Art of Attractive Yet Useable Sites 

Accessibility design. In this case the speaker was a blind person and it was very interesting to see how the web looks for people with this kind of disability.

Daniel Burka (digg / Pownce) How User Feedback can Influences Design 

This seems obvious, but really enjoyed how Burka’s made the point clear. The app is for the users, not the other way around.

Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) The Architecture Behind WordPress.com 

Compelling speaker of a somewhat not so interesting presentation.

Robert Kalin (Etsy) The Future of Commerce 

I admire Kalin’s sense of confidence in his app and I do agree with his DIY anti-capitalist ethic. Good sense of style too. Good work.

Heidi Pollock (BluePulse) Taking Your Application Mobile 

Awesome talk about the too many quirks issues regarding implementation of mobile sites/apps to the not so high-end mobile market (phones with full featured web browsers).

John Resig (Mozilla Corporation) The Future of Firefox and JavaScript

This was pretty cool. Lots of stuff I didn’t know about the upcoming features of Firefox 3. Loved the audio and video tags demo. At least Mozilla people thrive for native standards adoption although technologies like AIR and Silverlight are becoming popular.

Kevin Rose (digg / Pownce) Lessons Learned From Launching Digg & Pownce 

Man, Kevin was the rock star of the conference. Popularity wise I mean… :1

Paul Graham (Y Combinator) The Future of Web Startups  

Good ol’ graham style. Check his essays

John Aizen & Eran Shir(Dapper) Practical Semantic Web 

Easily provide new means for people to access your content (such as RSS). You can use Dapper to create feeds, widgets, and APIs with your content and links. If people can’t make the web semantic why not make it for them?

Eric Rodenbeck, (Stamen Design) Next Generation Visualisations 

A great inspiration. Latest projects include Digg Labs visualizations. Check here

Joe Walker, (DWR) Comet: Making the Web a 2-Way Medium 

I’ve been using comet technologies for some time and I always felt that the Bayeux protocol was not the best solution because I feel that having a separate daemon handling live connections is not very elegant. Although I understand the portability easiness of doing something like it. A standard way of doing a server implementation would be the way to go (mod_comet or something). Good talk although Java’s DWR centric.

Erika Hall, (Mule Design) Copy is Interface 

Erika Hall showed some apps that made some really bad (and sometimes hilarious) communication design decisions. Do’s and Don’ts in communication design. Pretty cool.

Tom Coates (Yahoo!)  An Insight to FireEagle 

FireEagle is a location broker API that let’s you collect your current location information from location-enabled devices or services that you authorize. The specificity of the location data collected by Fire Eagle (e.g., city, street, latitude/longitude, etc.) depends on the authorized device or service that you link with Fire Eagle.
Check it.

Live Filming of Diggnation 

Check it out here.

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Presentations here
And upcoming audio and conference updates check FOWA’s site.