Congratulations to the isocket team on securing their funding!
I did a little bit of work with isocket a couple of months ago, and both John and Zak are great guys, so I am sure this will be the start of big things for them — best of luck, guys, now that the really hard work will start! 
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll quote Jamie Zawinski.” Now they have two problems.
Signal vs. Noise nail what makes a bad outage notification:
“One of the worst stock dummies that even I have resorted to in a moment of weakness is this terrible non-apology: ‘We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused’. Oh please.”
This puts me in mind of Joel Spolsky’s take on what makes a good one:
“… we set up a blog where we would document every outage in real time, provide complete post-mortems, ask the five whys, get to the root cause, and tell our customers what we’re doing to prevent that problem in the future.”
I want every site I use as a service to do this. Not one of the systems I’ve experienced which were supposed to tell me about outages have ever done the job properly.
Yeah yeah, I know, I know. The main problem is that work is going well, apart from the fact that we’re all flat out getting the next beta release ready for public use. It’s a rather big one! Oh, that and the change of address.
I’ll start posting again once the desk comes for the spare room, and I can set up my computer again. Promise!
In the mean time, Demian has some nice things to say:
“OpenX don’t have as much to worry about as I first thought.”
Thanks!
Todd Hoff on the High Scalability site writes:
Amazon’s EC2 sounds good, but how do you make use of all that throbbing CPU power?
Clearly Todd has only read about EC2, not used it. Don’t get me wrong, EC2 is great. But throbbing CPU power?
Do you have any idea how many server instances you have to fire up before you even get a pulse?
So, day two of the Future of Web Apps!
Mark Anders kicked things off with a demo of Flex Builder 2. That was actually pretty cool, I thought. I’m not much of a UI person (okay, I have no interest in UI design at all, beyond enjoying someone else’s nice UI) but it seemed like a pretty awesome way to create a Flash application. Mark also talked about how great ECMA will be in the future (nice) and also gave a quick demo of Apollo.
Next up Chris Wilson from Microsoft talked about IE7.
Khoi Vinh from NYTimes.com talked about site design. This was a great presentation, with lots of interesting things to note:
Simon Willison talked about OpenID. Hopefully people will take his advice, now that the war is won, and soon we will be able to enjoy everyone’s sites supporting OpenID!
Jonathan Rochelle from Google talked about the lessons learned from creating Google Docs & Spreadsheets. His advice complemented Khoi’s nicely, I thought:
Rasmus Lerdorf talked about the history of PHP, and the new filter_input() option in PHP 5.2. Hopefully some good will come of this!
Finally, the boys from Moo got up and spoke. The product sounds, and looks great. If only they didn’t have to go down the innocent path. There are few things that annoy me more than companies that think they are “cute”. Fun, I can deal with. Funny, I like. Energetic? Sure. Fresh and funky? Great. But “cute” is just annoying.
Tara Hunt’s presentation on Building Online Communities is now up on her site.
I’m back at work today helping out a client, and I didn’t have a chance to write up day two last night, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to do that tonight!
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!
