The Future of Web Apps

Unlike Linux Solutions which is mostly an expo, FOWA is a 2-day conference. While Linux Solutions targets the GNU community, FOWA focuses on Web programmers, which is yet another world of its own (but more exciting I think).

Who spoke? People from AOL, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Adobe, Microsoft, Vodafone, BT... And also people from Web2.0 startups: Netvibes (which blew me away the first time I used it last year), Moo, Digg, Quotations Book, and Last FM.

One amazing thing was the army of real-time bloggers taking notes on their laptops during the conference. All pics they uploaded to Flickr were automatically displayed on the FOWA page provided they were properly tagged. The absence of WIFI caused some frustration.

My favorite talk was the one about OpenId given by Simon Wilisson. The week before FOWA I listened to Scott Hanselman's podcasts about OpenId and Identity in general... It's about time something robust comes along to replace the heaps of user names/passwords we have to maintain -I have about a hundred for the various sites I registered with over the past 5 years. Simon's presentation was brilliant: from a distance he looks like an Elijah Wood with glasses. His talk was fast-paced, funny and clear; he obviously loves his stuff. With OpenId I could potentially reduce my hundred username/passwords to 3 or 4 personnas. Similarly in Cardspace I would have 3 or 4 cards, each one holding a certain amount of information about me. Simon mentioned the intention of Microsoft to get CardSpace to work with OpenId, which basically means: it will happen. I had a play with the CardSpace identity selector in Vista: looks nice and simple. The mp3 of Simon's presentation is on FOWA's website.

I had never heard of Tara Hunt before FOWA. She's a marketer and she focuses on the process of building relationship with communities. If Malcolm Gladwell had written the Tipping Point a bit later, he probably would have mentioned Tara Hunt. She's very pretty and charming and I like her hair-do. That's it, I'm in love with Tara Hunt now.

There was no physical separation between the speakers and the attendees so you could chat with them during the coffee breaks. I briefly talked with Chris Wilson from Microsoft. Chris Wilson has a good life: he's a program manager on Internet Explorer and a PADI instructor. He probably felt a bit isolated in a conference where most attendees were Mac users or Microsoft-bashers.

I had a chat with Thierry Bezier (www.leblogdebezier.com) a French blogger who gave up project management for video journalism. Pretty cool job: he travels around the world -mostly Asia- to interview directors of Web 2.0 start-ups. He was just coming back from South Korea and was getting ready to edit piles of video rushes on his laptop... Being a complete tourist I talked for ten minutes with Tristan Nitot before I realised he was the president of Mozilla Europe.

The booths were set-up in the coffee area: Microsoft was giving away 300 copies of Expression Web which is pretty good considering Expression costs around £250. I'm currently using Dreamweaver for Golios.com but I'm willing to give a serious try to Expression. Adobe was there too, demonstrating Apollo.