The Future Of Web Apps
I spent three days last week at the Future of Web Apps.
FOWA is pretty much the premiere Web2.0 conference, at least from a techy/startup business point of view. It’s held been held in both San Francisco and London, but it originated in London in 2006. This year’s was the biggest yet, held at London’s huge Excel centre, a conference venue out in London’s Docklands area - a load of old brownfield/industrial space that’s been reclaimed by more modern business.
So what did I learn? Well, I learned a load of technical stuff that will be incomprehensible to most of you. Like, for example, on a normal website, only 5-10% of a page’s total render time in server side. The rest is all client side, and can be optimized by…
Oh look, you’ve all gone cross-eyed.
So instead, I am going to talk about it in more general terms. Recount a few of the things that struck me. This will probably be a bit scattershot an incoherent, but I’m trying to talk about a conference with a lot of different things goings on, in terms that will be accessible to everyone. Bear with me.
Someone put it to me the other week that the whole Web2.0 rubbish is basically an excuse for internet monkeys to charge each other huge sums to go to conferences where they all stand about proclaiming their own cleverness. While I think there’s more to Web2.0 than that, he’s not wholly wrong. Sending me to FOWA conference cost my company something like 700 quid (I did an extra day of workshops, beyond the main conference), and I’m only on the other side of London. An awful lot of the attendees were not, but more on that later.
So for those of you who still don’t really understand the term, a brief explanation of Web2.0, and what it is. I don’t blame you for not understanding, because it’s a term with multiple meanings, but can really be distilled down into the current generation of “social websites”, by which I mean websites that allow you to store data about your relationship with other users on the site - friends/buddies/contacts/people you once threw fish at/whatever. There is more to the term - it carries with it certain connotations of technology, in particular one called AJAX which is the reason that you don’t always have to load a new page when you submit a form these days, and certain expectations of design - large text sizes, bright colours, etc. It doesn’t mean very much, because mostly it’s a term for people who’ve been working down the internet mines for ten years now (my 10 year anniversary of professional web work is next February. Send strong drink.) to distinguish the technology and working practice of the last two or three of years (where we have started to be able to talk about things like “good practice”, because we’ve all done enough bad work to know how to improve), from the gently freewheeling anarchy of the five-ten years or so before.
So: FOWA. A conference for people who at least aspire to do good work on the web. What’s it all about, then?
There were three speakers that blew the other away, as far as I was concerned.
Heidi Pollock, talking about developing for mobile phones was fantastic. It was plainly obvious that she loves her work - and she must because it strikes me that developing for phones is rather like things were when I started out, when if you could get a site to work on a purely functional level cross-browser that was fine, and fuck getting it to look perfect in all of them. You just made it work, and accepted that there were times when you just weren’t going to be able to do a given thing. I was fun, in a frustrating sort of way. But then, Heidi can be sure that her work is accessible to people living in remote parts of Africa - that they use it, and it improves their lives. (Even if it is just checking the football scores on a mobile phone shared by five people and a goat.) After a number of years working on sites for the media-rich, I would give a reasonable amount to actually work on a website that had some social value, and to be able to know that my work was improving the lives of people who aren’t in Hoxton. (But on the other hand, I earn good money, and I sleep just fine, so don’t get the violins out…)
Matt Biddulph of Dopplr clearly loves his work. In all honestly, I think it’s catering to the rich and faintly smug - it’s a site for frequent travellers, to enable then to work out who’s in town where at any given time, in order that they be able to go for a drink, or whatever. I’m sure if I travelled a lot on business, it’d be handy. And I’d probably be faintly smug, too. But the furthest I’ve got any prospect of getting to go on a work dime is Guernsey, which lacks a certain jet-set glamour.
I’m being hard on Biddulph, and for no reason. He had a lot to say about good practice, and about a lot of useful technical stuff, and I’m only being harsh because I can’t really shared the details of his talk on APIs and cross-application data transfer without… yes, you’ve gone cross-eyed again, haven’t you? He clearly loves his work, and again he can see his friends, at least, deriving value from something he’s built.
And finally, Tom Coates of Yahoo. I have long been jealous of the sort of work Tom gets to do - basically, developing interesting new shit. His current thing is a service that isn’t even in beta yet that can use a variety of means to gather location-based data on their own movements for its users, for them to share, or use in conjunction with other apps. It’s basically a middleman service, that can take geodata from a variety of places, and make it available in a consistent format. Of course there are big brother concerns, but they’re doing their best to make it all completely user controlled, and have clearly thought hard about it, and honestly, it’s one of the last great web frontiers - an actual tie back to real-world geography. There is a lot that can be done, good and bad, with that, and it’s definitely worth doing. Again, clearly someone that can see actual world-changing (at least potentially) value in his work.
Other speakers of note: Kevin Rose of Digg/Pownce and Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress were both relaxed and entertaining, and I at least was interested to hear that both outsource as much of their sysadmin as much as they can, contrary to the trend of the early 00s, where you weren’t to be taken seriously if you didn’t own your own servers. I don’t have a lot to say about these two, except that they’re both as confident of as you’d expect young men who have already made their names and set up very successful business to be. The bastards.
I think it’s interesting that two out of three of my favourite speakers are in the geo-location field. They’re in the business of tying an internet presence back to a physical space, and deriving value from the information.
So, what else did I notice? Well, on the back of napkin, about 75% of the conference’s speakers were American. And a sizeable proportion of the attendees were from Eastern Europe. These things interest me, because it speaks badly of our home-grown talent. The British people that did introduce themselves as being for company X or Y were either journalists for print or web, or were companies that could probably summarise their product as “we’re from the less successful alternative to the web app you actually use”.
On the technical front: Everyone, but everyone seems to be haring off down the blind alley of “taking your web app off-line” . I don’t get it. All the value of a good web app is derived from that fact that it is on-line. That it’s talking to the world. If it’s something you don’t need to be on-line to do, why the fuck would you build it as a web app? But on the other hand, Adobe and Google apparently employ clever people, and they seem to think it’s the thing to do. Still, something to watch over the next year or two. Maybe someone will actually come up with a web app that benefits from having an off-line mode.
I don’t really think I’ve got much else to say. It all felt a bit business as usual. The bloom is off the web2.0 rose - it’s no longer new and exciting, and everyone’s still trying to work out what’s next. The geo-stuff will be an interesting next step, but the other big paradigm shift everyone’s predicting feels like a blind alley to me. I think it’ll be another year or so before the jury’s in on that, by which time I hope something a bit more exciting will have happened in the industry. If it hasn’t, I don’t see next year’s FOWA being worth going to.