400 Bad request

Rather than listing everything that was talked about over the 2 day event I’ve put together some notes on things that stood out.

280 Atlas

Atlas is a development environment for building web/desktop apps with Cappuccino. Looks really easy to setup and should be available in November – check out the demo below.

PayPal Change How We Pay

PayPal are opening up their platform. What does this mean? Check out the ‘Anthem Video’ below.

Facebook Connect Wizard

Facebook now has an easier way for you to setup Facebook connect on your site. Check out Facebook Connect Wizard.

HTML5

Bruce Lawson gave a great talk on HTML5. I’m definitely a lot more excited about it now.

Check out HTML5 Demos for some cool examples (best viewed in Opera).

Go Test It

Go Test It is a useful tool for running website tests across various browsers. Sign up for a free trial.

Other speaker notes

• Addison Berry – Make your app ‘open’, the more open it is the more you will have people contributing for free
• Osama Bedier – Remove friction and enable innovation
• Chris Abad – praise your passionate community, incentivise users to market for you, make use of viral channels (e.g. Twitter updates)
• Robin Christopherson – 80% of Twitter is from mobile devices, captchas = 7% loss in conversions
• Alex Hunter – Be emotionally invested in your brand and be willing to risk your reputation on your app
• Lynne d Johnson – 35% of adults now have Facebook profiles
• Dave McClure – Less = more, remove features, focus on UX, make fast iterations and measure goals

As far as I know the videos of each talk will be uploaded shortly.

Met lots of great people at FOWA, all doing really interesting things. If there’s an opportunity for you to attend a future FOWA, take it :)

1. Push your content to other sites

Kevin Rose – Digg – The Future of News
Stuff that happens on your web app should be easily pushed and shared with other apps e.g. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed

2. Monetize later when the community is built

Edwin Aoki – AOL – Web Apps Are Dead – Long Live Web Apps
Building the community and bringing people together is what matters. Build the web app based on your passion and then monetize.

3. Do stuff later when the user is gone

Joe Stump, Blaine Cooke – Digg & (ex)Twitter – Languages Don’t Scale
Queuing is a technique you can use to do stuff later when the user is gone therefore speeding up the immediate response. “Every large website has some sort of queuing mechanism”.

4. If you force users to supply info that doesn’t matter, you will get inaccurate data

Kevin Marks – Google – The Future of Enterprise Web Apps
Only ask the user for the info that matters to them (e.g. username, email, password). If you as for a zip code, for example, chances are you’ll get 90210 or 12345 – this information is worthless.

5. Plan to localize your app/social network

Kevin Marks – Google – The Future of Enterprise Web Apps
Containers provide a social context for your users and localization is a container already established geographically. If you localize your app it enables an easy way for people to form connections.

6. If they haven’t contributed yet, show them how

Alvin Woon – Plurk – The future of social app interface design
Every web app has novice and advanced users. You need to spend time with the novice users and educate them. When they register, show them how to do things. Expert users don’t need guidance, they’ll go off and do their own thing.

7. People love to look at data about themselves

Ben Huh – I Can Haz Cheeseburger – How to take your community to the next level
Info porn! Share info on a daily basis about your users and they’ll come back on a daily basis to check this data.

8. Make users contributors

Beh Huh – I Can Haz Cheeseburger – How to take your community to the next level
Let your users contribute – they’ll work for you for free (look at Wikipedia). Once you start paying people to contribute, they become employees and things get complicated and expensive.

9. There’s social value in knowing what your friends know

Bret Taylor – Friendfeed -The Future of your Online Presence
The data you provide should be relevant to your user. Even if you’re not interested in a particular subject, if 20 of your friends or family have read an article then you’ll want to read it too so you’re not left out.

10. Don’t prematurely Optimize

Elaine Wherry – Meebo – Scaling the Synchronous web
You can’t predict what’s going to happen your app so wait until it does happen and deal with it then, don’t waste your time trying to fix something that hasn’t happened yet.

Other areas of interest from FOWA

• Bun Huh’s lolcats were very popular (which, to be honest, I just don’t get)
• Kevin Marks made a good point: In Star Trek, why doesn’t the computer know what date it is? (Captain’s log stardate…)

Photos thanks to:

• Phil Hawksworth
• mauricesvay
• sprain
• Rain Rabbit
• drewm
• jimjarmo
• thecodefarm