The Future of Web Apps conference started today, and I’m lucky enough to be going along to all three days. Here’s my thoughts on day one.
Mike Arrington from TechCrunch kicked off the day with his thoughts on The Future of Start-Ups and Web Companies. However, he started his presentation with the caveat that he’s paid to think about start-ups and so on, but most of the great start-ups have ignored his ideas, so I don’t really know what we were meant to take home from his presentation 
. Still, the obvious points – you need a good idea, you need great people, and you need to get people into it – were worth mentioning, I guess. I did also notice that Mike thinks Apollo is the best thing since sliced bread.
Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency gave an interesting talk on Building Online Communities. There wasn’t much in the presentation that you couldn’t guess that you would need to do if you want to involve people in your product/site and build a community; but it was still interesting to see the common features of their case study of different healthy communities. The presentation was very dense on the content side, so hopefully I’ll be able to update this article soon with a link to the slides.
Danny Rimer was, alas, unable to make it, so Ben Holmes from Index Ventures stepped in to talk about Everything you need to know about Funding. This isn’t something that has any immediate impact on me at the moment, but it was interesting to hear him talk about when not to get investment, what VC companies are looking for – a product, not an idea; and great people – and what they will want from you in return for investment (ie. their share of the stock, representation, reverse vesting, and veto on the exit strategy).
Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia gave the stand-out presentation of the day, talking about Lessons from Building the World’s Largest Social Music Platform. The presentation really gave an insight into how being open with their community helped them grow. This meant being open in terms of making the API open so that developers could get involved, and also so that people would be willing to share their attention data with last.fm, because the open API meant that the attention data wasn’t “owned” by last.fm, as users could get their data out of the system if they wanted it – and when they did, it was worth more than when it went in, because last.fm had added value by performing collaborative filtering on the data.
Being open also meant being open in terms of process, and letting their community know about the good and the bad – Matt mentioned that he thought it was odd that in the early days, when the hardware crashed, they would actually get more donations from users immediately afterwards, because the open approach meant people were engaged and involved in what was going on with their service.
Anil also talked about processes, and how last.fm are trying to ensure that their communications and processes are as light weight as possible, so that while information is shared – as it needs to be – the processes don’t get in the way of doing their development. I gather from talking to Anil (we used to work together) that the idea of agile processes is something that he’s enjoyed bringing to last.fm from how we do it at Openads.
Werner Vogels from Amazon (I can’t bring myself to link to Amazon) ran through the Amazon S3 and EC2 service offerings, but didn’t really say anything that I didn’t already know.
Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! talked about, well, basically Pipes. It’s a cool idea for the future of web applications, and I’m keen to see where this can go. In question time, Bradley mentioned that Y! are obviously concerned about people using web site scraping as a source of data for Pipes, and the content and copyright stuff that goes with that, so it will be interesting to see if this becomes a real problem for them, or just a problem a la YouTube.
Kevin Rose from Digg talked about some of the problems they deal with at Digg, as well as features planned for the future. He announced that Digg will be joining the ranks of sites that support OpenID, so I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s talk on OpenID. There was a question about splitting Digg into different social groups that got a big cheer – but I’ll talk about that more in depth in another post soon!