I spent part of last week in San Francisco at The Future of Web Apps conference - it was great! I really had a great time and learned quite a few things.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, I got to hang out with Marc Orchant - who has a good summary of the conference on his ZDNet blog - which made the whole experience even better.
For me, the best presentation was a two-way tie between Carl Sjogreen (How We Built Google Calendar) and Tom Coates (Social Change on the Web).
Carl did a wonderful job of describing the process that they used to develop the Google Calendar (good notes here, h/t to Marc for pointing to them). Tom spoke about Polyphony (where many voices make lots of data comprehensible) vs. Consensus (many contributors make one voice, e.g. Wikipedia) as well as a lot of other really great stuff.
My next favorite presentation was Ted Rheingold (The state, future and business of passion-centric communities), Ted runs Dogster & Catster - this guy gets it, clearly. He was smart and articulate and he totally understands "community".
Rounding out my Top 5 is Mike Davidson of Newsvine and last, but not least, was Tantek Celik who spoke about Microformats.
I took really good notes, but since they technically belong to my employer - who paid for me to go to the conference - I kind of feel strange sharing them.
That having been said, if you want to chat about The Future of Web Apps, I'm all for it! Comment or email me. I totally dig this subject!
Did you go to the conference? What did you think? If you didn't go but have an opinion about where Web Apps are headed, leave a comment or point me to your blog!
UPDATE: Whoops - forgot to include the fuzzy cell-phone pic of Alcatrazz that I took down at Fishermans Wharf.
Hey, Y arent u updating ur Story Blog?
Posted by: Neo | September 22, 2006 at 06:17 AM
Neo, good question - just not enough hours in the day... :-(
Posted by: Jon Strande | September 22, 2006 at 08:20 AM