Attended WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference

I attended the WebGuild Web 2.0 conference, 29 Feb. They expected around 300 people and were surprised to find 1200 attending. They had two keynote speakers and sessions divided into four track. I found it a mixed experience. The sessions I attended ranged from very informative to useless. A key item missing was any definition or explanation for what is Web 2.0 and what was just an improvement over the typical website and experience.

The opening Keynote was by Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia. While the WebGuild blog posting called the talk fantastic, I would describe it as interesting. He talked about the background and philosophy of Wikia and Wikipedia. It seemed a bit “canned”. The one interesting piece was their newly launched Wikia Search. It will be worth following this effort to see if crowdsourcing and providing open access to the code and algorithms will create a search engine that can match the money and clever young folks at Google.

The second Keynote was an interview with Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist. As usual, Craig was very easy going and low key while still engaging. He was very open about the design and philosophy that drive the folks at Craigslist. It was good to hear someone resist the urge to jump onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon. His brief description of his current role as a customer service representative was amusing and served to emphasis the focus on the customer.

I found Steve Souders, former Chief Performance Yahoo!, and now working on web performance at Google, informative and inspiring. Most of the tips and techniques he talked about are of use to the current web site designers. It was good to hear about studies validating what the user centered design people say about page downloads. Bloated and poorly designed pages download slower and people notice. The Google study showed a loss of 20% of the traffic when the page download time increased by just one half of a second. For them, traffic equals revenue, so download speed does matter.

I attended a panel discussion on “Designing Search Friendly Sites”. The members of the panel were all very informative. There was Paul O'Brien, Marketing Director, Zvents, Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing, and Charles DiFazio, Software Engineer, Google. Andreas Mueller, CTO, Bloofusion was the moderator. The comments and recommendations covered the common items, such as link backs, content, keywords, and the importance of building a site that the search engine can crawl. A big warning was issued to the designers rushing to create Web 2.0 sites using Ajax, Flash, content that requires a login, images, and multimedia applications. Charles reminded us that if the site was set up so that a blind person can access the information, then a search engine crawler will be about to find it.

The panel discussion on “Designing the Mobile Web” was not as useful for me. The members of the panel were knowledgeable and were working in the area. Julie Ask,
Vice President & Research Director, Jupiter Research moderated and the panel members were: Barbara Ballard, Founder & President, Little Springs Design, Ain Indermitte, Senior Developer Relations Manager, Nokia, and Brad Lassey, Mozilla. The take away was that mobile phones in the US are becoming more functional and that people are using them to access the web. Once again, we are reminded that people need a Smart phone or one of the high end models. As these become more affordable, companies need to plan and develop ways for the phone user to access information. Some of the current web design items, such as cookies, Ajax, and even metrics do not work well when people use the phone to access the web. The work done by Apple with the iPhone, Nokia, and Google’s Android operating system for phones were pointed to as indicators.

It was good to attend. From the topics, especially the sessions I did not attend, it appears most of what could be thought of as Web 2.0 revolved around Social Media oriented work. I believe that Web 2.0 is more than just FaceBook and YouTube. What it turns out to be, only time will tell.

Technorati tags: web design; Web 2.0; web apps; business strategy;

The Future of Web Apps, Panel Discussion at the monthly WebGuild Meeting

There was an interesting panel discussion last night at the WebGuild monthly meeting. John Rowell (Chief Technology Officer, OpSource), Brad Neuberg (Developer Advocate, Google Gears), Raju Vegesna (Evangelist, Zoho), and Bill Scott (Director of UI Engineering, Netflix) gave their impressions on were we currently are on the web and the trend toward Web Apps. The trend over the last two years has been MashUps, where you build a Web App that uses information and the infrastructure of a larger application. Two common examples are small Web Apps that running inside Facebook and Web Apps that use data from Google Maps.

This trend has been gaining ground under the term Software as a Service (SaaS). OpSource and AdventNet's ZoHo are good examples. OpSource is targeting the developers at both small and large companies. They provide the infrastructure to support the Web App. The companies can now focus their resources on the product and let OpSource worry about servers, storage, security, backups, extensibility, and all the other large, complex issues that come with owning the infrastructure.

Adventnet's ZoHo product line implements both the infrastructure and the Web Apps sitting on it using this separation approach. Using a common infrastructure, web App teams only need to focus on the features and functions of their products. Each product is light weight and the development is customer driven. They only add features and functions when they are requested by the customer. The infrastructure team creates and maintains the support systems. This enables them to roll out new Web Apps and make changes to the existing Web Apps quickly.

Google is a big player in the move to open source tools and applications that make it easier to use the web. Google Gears is an application that enables you to use the data from an on-line service when you are not on-line. Basically it creates a database on the client system used to cache the data from the on-line service. When your system does connect back to the on-line service, the data is automatically synced. While a little different, it proves a developer with a toolkit to create an App that uses the infrastructure of an existing on-line service, such as Google Maps, without being part of that company.

At first, Netflix's interest in this area was puzzling. Their focus is matching movies to customers and enhancing your movie experience. They have a huge database about movies and their customers. Opening that up to outside Web App developers is not the driving factor. With well over seven million subscribers, the infrastructure extensibility and the ability to create and deploy new features are complex problems. Redesigning the system to follow the model of separating the infrastructure from the Web Apps will help them handle the current and future demands. It will also make it easier for them to move into direct distribution.

For the Web App developers and the companies that own both the infrastructure and the Web Apps, this is a great move. As on-line services and applications grow, the infrastructure complexity, cost, and extensibility have become serious issues. This model is not new. For years, the satellite designer had used a common data bus that allowed different components to plug-in and communicate. We are now seeing the concept of the web as a big data bus start to drive the thinking. The issues of costs and monetization are quietly being discussed inside the major on-line service providers. They are creating APIs to allow controlled access to their data and functions. The trend of Web App developers creating products without large and expensive infrastructure investments will continue to grow. At some point, the people spending huge sums of money on the infrastructure will a way to collect payment form those developers. If you have a closed system, like Facebook, that becomes easy. The current movement is toward more open systems and not developing more closed gardens. It will be interesting to see how the usage and payment are tracked and how the costs are allocated.

Technorati tags: web design; software management; web apps; business strategy;