Hawksworx

I recently attended the Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference at London’s ExCel and I’m feeling good. Although I have been developing web applications since the late nineties, I am new to the conference circuit and have been soaking this up.

I have attended various trade-shows and what-not in the past, but these have not been quite so focussed on the kind of thing that interest so very much. Namely, making great things for the web. FOWA hits the bullseye for me. With a great balance of inspiration and guidance for the entrepreneur, and techie insights and advice for the developer, it caters for each part of my interest.

It’s refreshing to see such passion and enthusiasm among my fellow delegates, and I must say that it is truly infectious. For me, meeting people who work on similar projects to me, have similar problems to solve, and yet have different solutions and approaches yields great rewards. A tour around the FOWA Expo (a new addition to FOWA) is a good opportunity to chat to people and find out what they are up to. Be they exhibitors or delegates.

Both the Developer and the Entrepreneur stages were a draw to me, and so I found it difficult to choose between sessions at times. Luckily every presentation was recorded and will be available as a DVD so I can fill in the gaps later.

Stand outs for me where Steve Souders from Yahoo!, who’s presentation, “Building Sites to Withstand Users!” yielded some great tips that I will adopt immediately. Matt Biddulph of Dopplr gave a slick presentation about integrating 3rd party sites and services. For me, Dopplr won the ‘doing things right in web2.0 land’ award, showing that they have adopted some great practices and are behaving superbly with their open and unobtrusive approach to building services for the web. Granting users unfettered access to their data through an API rather than demanding that they only use the Dopplr website and embracing technologies such as OpenId and oAuth are things that strike a chord with me.

It was also difficult not to be inspired by the presentations of both Leah Culver of Pownce and Kevin Rose, also of Pownce but perhaps better known as the creator of Digg. Both talked about their experiences in setting up their respective sites and spoke about where they had gone wrong and the lessons learned along the way.

The crowd at the Developer stage swelled to around 1300 at the end of the second day for a live filming of Diggnation. I’m a new viewer of this Waynes World-esque webcast and am now officially hooked.

I was lucky enough to bump into Kevin after the conference, when he was heading into the city with Prager and Jay Adelson (who I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t recognise at the time). He was clearly still excited about the buzz generated at the Diggnation filming and rightly so, the place went nuts!

I could keep on enthusing for much longer, but I should wrap this up. Just time to send my thanks and congratulations to all the folks at Carsonified for organising such a great event. I’m already hoping I can wangle a trip to FOWA 2008 in Miami!