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Mike is the founder and CEO of Newsvine. Mike’s presentation at CarsonWorkshops The Future of Web Apps conference dealt with user generated content. User generated content is not a new concept, it is just a new buzzword. Amazon is driven by user generated content, user can review reviewers. Amazon, Ebay, Epionions have been using user genrated content for years, since web 1.0. The current examples of user genereated web 2.0 sites are MySpace and Digg. During this conference I head MySpace be used as an example every hour, I head people say things like “I want to be the MySpace of gardening.” I want to be the MySpace of fund of hedge fund software.

Mike said that “Delicious is a great way to extend your memory.” I use it as a reading list, I bookmark what I haven’t read but want to. YouTube is another often mentioned web 2.0 user generated content web application. Mike also mentioned that “the interesting thing about Second Life, is that fake products are being sold for real money in a fake environment. That is a market I am interested in being a part of.”
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Carl is the Product Manager of Google Calendar. During his presentation at The Future of Web Apps, Carl shed some light into the development process in place at Google on a typical project and his experience building a great web 2.0 application. Carl said that Google Calendar started as a ‘classic’ Google product team, that is 1 product manager and 3 engineers. The original idea of a Google calendar system was conceived from customer feedback and internal need. In design Google Calendar, Carl said that “being smart isn’t always best.” Carl explained how they over engineered some usability features in the early Google Calendar version that they had to dumb down or simplify for the general public.

Carl also provided six key insights for your next product or company that I will now copy here verbatim.

The first insight is that easy is the most important feature. Think Google Calendar QuickAdd, Google Maps single text field. Google Maps has a single field as opposed to a whole address, city, state, zip code form.
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Steve Olechowski is the cofounder and COO of FeedBurner. During his CarsonWorkshops The Future of Web Apps session he some insight into RSS feeds. I didn’t record all the ten things about RSS that I didn’t know, because what you don’t know wont hurt you and because they seemed unimportant for someone not working at FeedBurner.

One thing that I have been playing with is how much text should I display in my RSS feeds. I used to display the whole enchilada but then limited to the summary for each post. According to Steve, the most text you display on a RSS feed the more traffic will click through to your site. Steve admits this seems counterintuitive. In addition to more traffic, the more text you display on a your RSS feed the more people will subscribe to your feed, this is intuitive.

Another thing I didn’t know but that Steve shed light on is that podcasts are more evenly distributed across topics, sectors, categories than text blog feeds. I also didn’t know that 7% of RSS click through are made by bots. The last fact from Steve’s talk that I took notice was that RSS feeds is that they are being read on mobile phones.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, rss, feed, feeds, fowa

Tantek as the Chief Technologist at Technorati has helped shape and define new web standards. In this the fourth session of The Future of Web Apps conference Tantek described the benefits of using standardized Microformats. Microformats are small enhancements to standard HTML tags that help describe and classify the information that is being presented. According to Tantek, a microformat is a small bit of XHTML, a fast and simple way to provide an API. To illustrate this let me describe the Microformat suggested by Google to circumvent comment spammers. Google suggested that links in a blog comments apply a rel attribute with the value of nofollow. Here is an example:

[source:html]
<A href=”some url” rel=”nofollow”>some link</A>
[/source]
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Tom Coates is a Social Software Technologist at Yahoo! Tom talked about building social software that is greater than the sum of their parts in the CarsonWorkshops The Future of Web apps Conference. According to Tom, social software allows us to do “more together than we could do apart.” This is an interesting point, because anyone can slap a beta image on some HTML, add tags and Ajax effects, and call it a social web 2.0 thingamajig. But in the world wide web, if you build it they won’t necessarily come. So how do you build a web application that is greater than the sum of its parts? Well, in a nutshell Tom recommends the following: Users need to receive a value from their contribution, the contribution provides a value to peers, the aggregation of the contributions provide value to the organization. In other words, the web application needs to provide a sense of individual, social, and organizational value.

Tom had an interesting slide where he quotes someone whose name now escapes me. The slide read something like, “Two reasons for social software (and everything else): get laid and please Jesus!” Similarly I have read research conducted on Stargate fan sites that claim that the pyramids of Egypt had little to do with the after life and a lot to do with picking up the ladies. In addition to the obvious reasons of getting laid, Tom presented a list of common motives for community involvement. According to Tom (via Peter Kollack and The Economies of Online Cooperation), the motives behind community involvement include: anticipate reciprocity, reputation, sense of efficacy, identification with a group.

Tom also had an interesting list of the motives behind Open Source developers. The motives in order of importance include: learning to code, gaining reputation, scratching an itch, contributing to the commons, and sticking it to Microsoft.

Tom’s final remarks dealt with general advice on how to open up a web application to provide social value. Tom’s advice includes, exposing every axis of data possible, helping user to annotate, rate, comment, and share their contributions, allowing users to associate, connect, and form relationships, and finally to provide users with place to represent and express themselves.

In the end of his talk, Tom said, people want to feel like they have an effect on the world.

Technorati Tags: fowa, tom coates, web2.0, microsoft, open source

Kevin Rose is the Founder and Chief Architect of Digg and according to some fuzzy math from BusinessWeek he is worth an estimated $60 million. Kevin, like Bill Gates, is a college drop out. As a Digg user and DiggNation fan I feel that Kevin’s talk was a rehash of what he always talks about. I feel that I could have learned more if he would spill the beans and inform the crowd on his relationship with Lala, of TikiBar fame. But alas, instead of speaking about Lala, Kevin went into his usual discourse of founding Digg from one idea to nine million page views.

As stated earlier, Kevin’s stake in Digg is estimated at some $60 million dollars. So what was his initial investment? Kevin started Digg with a mere $2000, a web developer working for $10/hour, and $99/month hosting plan. All the components that make up Digg are standard LAMP software. Kevin recommend that people launch on the cheap and use off the shelf platforms.
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