Home Future Of Web Apps, Day 2

Future Of Web Apps, Day 2

Written by David
Lenehan of Polldaddy
and edited by Richard
MacManus. This is David’s account of the second and final day of the Future Of Web Apps 2007 conference in
London.

Adobe

Today started with Mark Anders, Adobe’s senior principal scientist. Mark previously
had worked on the Microsoft .NET project from it inception until 2003. He gave a good
technical demonstration of Flex and
then created an application on the fly, to search for photos on Flickr. He also showed
off an online photo editing site called picnik,
which was built with Flex. 

In other Adobe news, Actionscript 3 – which ships with the Flash 9 plugin – has some
impressive improvements and now runs at up to 10 times faster than AS 2.0 in some
circumstances. Going forward Adobe’s Tamarin (a.k.a. JavaScript
2), which was donated last year to the Mozilla project of the same name, will now be shipped with FireFox 4 – which is 2 versions away.

The future of the web browser

Chris Wilson from Microsoft, who has worked on Internet Expolorer from
version 3 up, was here to talk about the future of the web browser. He looked back
at the days when Outlook Web Access was one of the most advanced web apps around and
was using AJAX before it was even called AJAX. He talked about the rebirth of the
semantic web movement with RSS, microformats, and tagging. He ultimately talked at
length about IE 7 and the importance of security, standards support and more. 


Pic: Li==703

I am a web developer and I spend most of my time trying to work within browser
limitations. But I don’t buy the idea that IE 7 is a progressive browser. It
has taken about 6 years for them to release a new version – and there is nothing
revolutionary about it. They fixed all of the IE 6 bugs and added a list of modern
features, that we had already seen in FireFox. Yes IE 7 is at last a good stable browser
from Microsoft, which has addressed the security issues that had plagued IE 5 and
6, along with the problems with lack of standards compliance, but I don’t
think they deserve a pat on the back for that. 

Chris Wilson also addressed an issue that is for some people the holy grail in terms
of developing products for IE – having multiple versions of IE running on one machine. In
short he said that this just would not be possible now or in the future. It just can’t be
done, so no joy there. Not really a lot of information on the future of the browser in
the end, but looking forward the wpf/e browser
plugin is coming soon as a possible competitor for flash – and by the looks of it, it
might just cause a few shock waves.

Lunchtime Panel Discussion


Pic: Larsz

The following people were involved in the panel:

The lunchtime discussion was based on the topic: “European start-up culture – playing
catch up to the US”. It was a fairly brief and humorous discussion between the audience
and the panel members about this hot topic. The thoughts of the panel included
Ryan Carson voicing the need for some kind of bigco sponsored incubation centers, with
access to lawyers and business advisors to help foster new businesses. Mike Arrington
bluntly stated that people here need to stop talking about doing it and just do it. Mike
Butcher felt that the UK and Ireland has a very talented pool of creative people in this
industry, but there are structural and cultural barriers to over come. 

The rest of the panel talked about the problems with access to seed capital and the
fact that there have been some very successful companies in Europe, such as Skype, who
should be an inspiration to local startups here. There were some good questions from the
audience, but there was just not enough time to discuss this topic. George Bush was
dragged into it, Arrington called for the BBC to be dissolved and Tariq Krim was accused
of using his position to chat up girls in Silicon Valley! A good show though overall.

The Mobile Web

At last some talk of the
mobile world came in the form of Daniel Appelquist from Vodafone. The first thing he did was to find out,
by way of the raising of audience hands, who used their mobile to access the web
regularly. This showed that most people in the room here use a mobile device to access
the web on a regular basis, and that most had even done so in the past 24 hours. A very
interesting fact that is obvious when you read it, but very interesting at the same time,
is that there are up to 4 times more mobile devices in use around the world that have web
access, than there are computer and laptops with web access. These numbers are
confirmation of just how big this space really is. In the UK vodafone data shows that the
biggest destinations for web users are Hotmail, BBC News and then Google. He talked
at length about the need for more adoption of standards by mobile
developers. Vodafone has a best practices list that they
advise everyone to follow:

– Design for one web

– Rely on web standards

– Stay away from known hazards

– Be cautious of device limitations

– Optimize navigation

– Check graphics and colors

– Keep it small

– Use the network sparingly

– Help and guide user input

– Think of users on the move

He also stressed the importance of thematic consistency for your content, across
mobile and more traditional browsers, to ensure a comfortable user experience. For more
info on best practices, check out: http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI
/BPWG/techs/

NetVibes Announcement

Tariq Krim from Netvibes made a quick announcement about their
new universal widget API.  You will now be able to develop a widget for
Netvibes and it will work across a whole host of other platforms, such as
google desktop etc. You can see a preview of it here next week: http://eco.netvibes.com/uwa. He also mentioned
that they are going to support OpenID in the near future.

NYTimes.com

Khoi Vinh, design director for the New York
Times
, said that “the future is going to be awesome!” He talked about the
problems they had in coming to terms with using the web as an effective outlet for
their content, and interestingly how they tried to use the same templates in terms of
content and layout where ever possible, both in the print and online versions. They
understood that it was important to open up a dialogue with their readers, obviously
learning from the power of the blogosphere in communicating with their readers in this
way. 

NYTimes has some cool new community applications to enhance the user experience.
MyTimes is a sort of start page app that you can use
to pick and choose the kind of content from their site that you want to see. TimesFile is a bookmarking system for
creating your own archive of stories you like. Integrating one click sharing with digg,
newsvine etc. has helped to generate more and more readers. 

Vinh also talked about the problems that many sites have to deal with in displaying
‘counter-quality sources’ – such as high def video and quality photographs from a digital
SLR, right down to YouTube quality video and images taken on camera phones etc.

Opining on OpenID

Simon Willision was here to help promote the OpenID standard, and he talked very
passionately about it. He also talked extremely fast, so please excuse me if I have noted
anything incorrectly here. With a number of high profile sites recently announcing
support for OpenID, such as AOL and Digg, it is a topic that is really beginning to come
out of the shadows and into the realm of wide spread adoption. [Ed: see Read/WriteWeb’s
current poll
for more on this topic]

Simon started by addressing the all important question of: “what problem does it
solve?” Well its simple, if it takes off – all of us will just have one ID and
password to log in and out of all of our accounts. Keeping track of all your account
information is a nightmare, if you have a very bad memory like I have. I’m not going to
go into too much detail about how OpenID works, but what sets it apart from similar
systems is that it goes a long way to solving one big stumbling block people have with
this concept – would you trust one company with managing your identity? With OpenID
anyone can manage your identity, it’s up to you to choose that provider. Once you do
choose a provider, which at the moment could be live journal for example, all you have to
do is log into that OpenID account once and then you can go to any site that
supports OpenID, enter your ID and password, and your details will be confirmed
against your provider. That’s it, one login for all of your sites. 

One great concept of OpenID is that you can create multiple personas on the one ID.
You create a persona that you want to submit to a particular site, and another one that
you want to submit to a different type of site. So I might choose to make up a fake name
to use on my AOL account and not hand over very much address information, while at the
same time I might choose to give far more accurate data over to my Digg account,
through a different persona attached to my OpenID.

In Simon’s own words, the things that “suck” about OpenID are various issues
surrounding phishing and security, but I’m sure most of these can be overcome. One
interesting benefit of OpenID is that when a user comments on a blog, he/she can be added
to a whitelist as a trusted user. When a user or bot enters spam into a blog comment,
they can be added to a blacklist. These lists can then be shared amongst bloggers
through various yet to be invented systems, which would help identify the good
users from the bad. I think it’s very clear from this simple example, that the idea of
rating users based on their behavior, and this then being shared between applications,
would help streamline a lot of avenues on the web. One downside I see with a third
party holding your info, is that they will be able to track your activity across the web
with very little effort – but you do get to choose your own provider that you trust and
so you are not locked into any particular one. But the stakes are higher with OpenID, if
it’s adopted, because any security breach of the data would be disastrous. Get
someone’s OpenID details and you get access to all of their sites.

Summary

The Future of Web Apps conference came to a close today. They are hosting a day of
workshops tomorrow, which should be very informative. I talked with conference organizer
Ryan Carson for a while today and he said that the next FOWA was going to take place in
the US in September; and again in London this time next year. If you are near one in the
future, I would definitely advise you to go along. It is good value for money and is
small enough that you get to meet a lot of the people speaking, to talk with them further
on a one to one basis. As with any conference like this, there are also ample
opportunities to network. I for one have enjoyed the past few days.

Ed: Thanks so much to David for summarizing the two days for those of us who
couldn’t attend.

Photo credits: donkeyontheedge [1, 2] and carl_gaywood

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