I am currently blogging live from the Future of Web Apps Conference in San Francisco with Jeremiah Owyang who is also blogging live. I am providing you with this information in real time from my first web conference! The most recent information will be at the bottom of the page. Please check back!

There are even some participants from Lunch 2.0, which Jeremiah and Hitachi Data Systems hosted just yesterday!

SPEAKER: Dick Hardt, blogs at http://blame.ca/dick Representing http://www.sxip.com

Emerging Age of Who What is Identity?

• Past behavior predicts future behavior
• Digital identity = yahoo, flickr, google (vitamin), delicious
• Identity 2.0 = users in charge from centralization (easy to manage identities), allow identities to be cross compatible with other sites (bring ebay reputation throughout the web)
• Ebay = separate accounts, no sign on across like yahoo

My Thoughts

Dick’s presentation was very energetic, fast paced, and “different” (which is great for a preso to start off with). He used some analogies that were different including pain killers, vitamins, and Viagra. Identity 2.0 is emerging and I am anxious to see how online identities will integrate, that’s if they do.

SPEAKER: Kevin Rose from http://www.digg.com

• What is digg? How did it start?
  • October ’04, experiment with $2000 (developed project spec, basic utilitarian design, $99 hosting plan
  • New site, everything is created and promoted by users, users can “digg” stories, customize homepages, track users
  • My profile has own associated RSS feeds (sites I’ve dugg, commented on, friends page, etc)
• Feature Decisions
  • No advertising, all word of mouth
  • Tools for self expression
  • Stay away from “me too” features (adding tags, etc) – what benefit does the feature has? (tags to online banking = bad idea)
  • Simple and rewarding – one click (comments and buries)
  • Destroy the garbage
  • Experiment – stack, swarm, bigspy, activities of users
• What’s Next? Digg Labs à Stack & Swarm (Awesome!) + Diff Effect
  • Real-time activity of users
  • Graphs, charts, analytics
  • Learn how users are gathering around stories
  • Provides real time info of the new stories that are being digged
  • Learn more about users interests from stories that are digged
• Story suggestions and friend suggestions (like Amazon)
• Connecting users with other users b/c of interests (different from Friendster, Myspace, etc)
• Stats à 500k users, 10M pages per day, 1M daily users
• Tip for scaling = PDF “Inside LiveJournal’s Backend”
• Will be an open API coming soon
• Custom feeds through search (search for apple with 500 diggs)

My Thoughts

First off, Kevin is really young! It’s amazing to hear the story of how he created Digg and what’s next in Digg Labs. The analytics available is very web 2.0 and fun! I am not an avid user of digg, but I think I will take another look at it.

10 things you didn’t know about RSS

• 1. No correlation between click through rate to HTML site and number of subscribers, very erratic and fluctuate
  • Reason people go from a feed to the site is worth looking into to, something happening that cannot be explained
• 2. Consumer devices can drive the market, the power of releasing a device like RSS and iTunes + iPod supporting podcasts (people didn’t realize they were using RSS)
• 3. More text in the feed, gets more TOTAL traffic
  • Adding more text, increases subscribers to feed because the feed audience is different from daily browsers
• 4. Podcasts are more evenly distributed across categories than text RSS feeds
  • But, text feeds will soon become more distributed
  • 15% of podcasts are video, so video is growing, video will eclipse audio podcasts in a year
• 5. Different feeds and different types of content have different breakdowns about how they are read on feedreaders
  • RSS is a global phenomenon, more blogs in Japan and China than N. America and Europe together, RSS has become bigger than blogs!
  • In consumer feeds, aggregator breakdowns are from mass media mediums like yahoo
• 6. There over 3,000 RSS clients out there
• 7. And a LOT of bots
  • Click on content and find relationship between RSS feeds
  • The average click through rate of an RSS item is 7%, ALL BY BOTS, be careful when reading stats on who is a real person and who is a bot
• 8. MyYahoo! leads by a large margin for subscribers in RSS
  • Personalized homepages like MyYahoo are large subscribers, Firefox trails
• 9. RSS is being read on Mobile
  • 2,900 mobile user agents reading RSS feeds
  • Top clients = Nokia podcasting client, Sony Ericson, LG, Sony, Motorola
• 10. Publishers are making money with RSS
  • Using RSS to drive traffic to their site, but they will find that these are separate audiences, people reading feeds are those who can reached on daily basis (they like to read feeds), but average browser is a different audience

Mor Naaman representing Yahoo! and demonstrating “ZoneTag”

Demo of ZoneTag Mobile Client

• Use mobile devices to help create, find, discover, share media = future of web apps
• ZoneTag Basics
  • 2-click upload, smooth experience
  • Photo uploaded with location and time metadata
  • Can set privacy settings, title, and add tags
• ZoneTag Advanced
  • Tag/annotate your photos from the phone: easy with tag suggestions
• Where do these tags come from?
  • From the user, users friends, other people who visit the same location = user generated!
  • Stuff around you, upcoming.org, from RSS 2.0 feed (Calendar, hangouts)
• Where do tags go?
  • Back to the orginal RSS items (Upcoming.org)
  • Action Tags
    • Trigger a call to a web service
    • Command Line – from your phone
• ZoneTag for all
  • runs on Nokia Series 60 phones
  • Available as a prototype API – put it on a plaform

“How we built Google Calendar” http://www.google.com/calendar

• Designed to manager your own personal schedule and share it with others
• Requests to build calendar from customers, started off with a vague idea, then started the plan
• “If you are in marketing, you are doing your job IF you are spending money and talking to customers” — quote from Carl (it made Jeremiah laugh)
  • talked to college students at Stanford, student leaders, professors, working couples to see what they were using to coordinate their activities
  • performed a “diary setting” of open ended questions, but found that some students did not keep calendars even though they were busy…good information for research!
• Key Themes emerged:
  • People said calendars werent necessary b/c they were a pain to keep up to date especially when it combined others (friends, family) = big investment of time –> Google wanted to create something that was painless and saved time
  • Recognized that people have a personal connection to a calendar –> the look and feel of it is necessary because they have a connection to it
• 4 things the calendar must do
  • had to be fast, visually appealing to the user
  • had to be drop dead simple to get info onto the calendar
  • has to be more than boxes on a screen, wanted to make sure the events put into the calendar add value (notifications, reminders,  and  easy to share)
  • important to design a product in a consumer oriented  world, where not everyone has the same needs and wants
• Invested time and energy on Google Infrastructure from 5 to 5 million users
• Focused on interaction and the operations of the calendar, then worked on the UI design (how to make it look good)
• Once you build the product, launching the product is difficult, but PRIVATE BETA testing is essential to get feedback before launching it live = IMPORTANT
• Insight #1 = Easy is the most important feature
• Insight #2 = Know your real competition
• Insight #3 = Visual Design Matters
• Insight #4 = Build products for people who don’t want to use them
• Insight #5 = Timing Launch Properly
• Insight #6 = Driving Usage