Ian Winter

Having had an email over the weekend to connect with someone on a social network site I'd forgotten I was a member of I decided to work out a list of the sites I am indeed signed up to.

Turns out I need to get out a bit more. In no particular order:

Digg
LinkedIn
Last.fm
YouTube
Twitter
Flickr
Dopplr
Facebook
Plaxo
Pownce
Jaiku

A day of updates.

Apple have finally announced that on March 6th they're going to talk about the iPhone roadmap and SDK [via]

LinkedIn have launched a new design for the site. A cross between Facebook & Flickr in my opinion.

Google Docs has a slight tweak to it's toolbar making it more MS Office esq. Google also launched Sites for Google Apps, online wiki from all accounts. Need to get myself a Google Apps account to check it out.

So Zimki announced themselves at FOWA 07 earlier in the year and their pre shaved yaks drew much attention however it seems they are no more!

We regret to inform you that the Zimki service is to be withdrawn and therefore will no longer be available from 24 December 2007. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.

One of the first things that will be disabled is the token usage section so unfortunately you will be unable to view your realms' usage (code, bandwidth, storage etc.). You will still be able to create and manage your realms, and realms will not be suspended for exceeding usage restrictions during the close down period.

As of 24 December 2007 all applications and data remaining on the Zimki service will be deleted and the servers decommissioned. Users are advised to move their applications along with any associated data before the closure date. There are no plans to opensource Zimki.

We hope that Zimki has helped to increase your knowledge and understanding of the possibilities that utility computing and an online application framework can bring. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest and support with beta testing the Zimki service.

The Fotango Team

Currently at FOWD up in London. More interesting so far that FOWA, some good points on web application character and involving the user.

10 tips on form design from Ryan at 37signals, Denise from moo.com on character, George from flickr with some good comments on sustaining user involvement.

First up on day 2 was Mark Anders, Sr. Principal Scientist at Adobe. Interestingly in described the web he mentioned PHP before Coldfusion! His preso was interesting but didn't cover a huge amount of stuff that wasn't already about. Some interesting demo's showing how much quicker AS3 is over AS2 and the usage in Flex 2. Also how Flex 2 has a new JIT compiler. He mentioned Tamarin and Apollo. Apollo looks like it could be really cool, but, need to see some more examples that are usable. Hopefully it'll get onto labs soon.

Chris Wilson, Platform Architect over at Microsoft did a presentation on "The Past, Present and Future" of the browser, or, IE. Covered what they did in IE7 and not a huge amount else. Mentioned the free tool VStudio Express and also heavily pushed WPF/E at the end.

Khoi Vinh has some interesting stuff to say about design of nytimes.com and how the template system within the CMS works. He had a good quote:

"we're not early adopters, we're selective adopters"

which I think in some cases is a good way to me. Also had some interesting points on navigation and keeping it simple and remember that user's don't need to get everywhere from everywhere.

Simon Wilison generated a lot of interest and had some good points relating to openid and I agree with his points that it's really cool but might still be a bit to new. The delegation stuff with server identities is also really cool.

The chap from Google didn't really say a huge amount about Docs and Spreadsheets, some bits on architecture were interesting but in Google style no details.

Vodafone had a presentation which covered aspects of the mobile web but generally bigging up how much they're getting involved in standards. With such high data costs in the UK I think it's a while before this starts becoming main stream. They've also launched a beta programme.

Rasmus Lerdorf, aka Mr PHP now at Yahoo, was very good. Down to earth and a realist. Good points about getting benchmarks and profiling applications so you know what's going on before you try to fix the problems rather than just throw hardware at it. Good comments on cross site scripting and why it's bad, aside from the obvious!

Netvibes announced that they're launching a Universal Widget API. Sounds pretty cool will let you write widgets once then deploy to MAC, Google etc. Not quite sure how they'll make money, but, not my problem. Should be good :)

I've skipped the "open mic" sessions as they weren't really any good at all. Not Carson's fault I suppose and I guess the idea was good, but don't think many people voted and the winners weren't really too interesting and quite subjective.

moo.com were I think the best up today, perhaps equal to Rasmus. Their presentation was simple and classy, and didn't have a purple or gradient background!!! Good points from the CTO such as "never rollout on a friday" (which I wish my company would adopt). Slightly staggered that they have real people packing cards, checking for copyright infringement and the level of quality. It's a good thing service wise but still quite shocking. They come over as very cool and seem to be scaling quickly and successfully. Will be considering them for the next Caffeine Press set of business cards I think!

The orange loving French man from ContactOffice.com was last up and to be honest wasn't a great close out after the brilliant moo.com guys.

Overall the conference was good and there were some excellent presentations and some good points raised. RSS, openid, keep it simple, don't scale too soon and communities would be the key things in my opinion that came out of it.

Next up, FOWD which should also be good. Looking forward to the 37signals talk.

Some of you may know as well as being a day to day web developer for Rawnet I'm also the Technical Director over at Caffeine Press, a company I founded with an ex-colleague and mate back in 2004.

The site has recently been re-launched with a nice web2.0 tastic design and UI elements. There's plenty more to come on the site with a lot more detail going to be added to the portfolio about the sites and some pretty little thumbnails (probably off alexa's service but tbc) and also a blog keeping you in the loop as to what we're up to and what's coming soon on the sites. I won't say any more but off the back of FOWA day 1 it's confirmed so ideas we were planning are definitely worth pushing on.

flatpackedworld is far from done either. I've got a load of code I want to publish and also still need to finish the design. Comments need to be done and the archive pages are going to be hidden away a bit in favour of a nice tag cloud type thing (not sure exactly what just yet), also need to work on my stream to hook in flickr, twitter, last.fm and del.icio.us updates.

Got a side track idea on the "stream" thing, but, not sure if it as any legs yet and is still very much a "in my head" idea, hey you never know it might work.

Lots of good stuff at FOWA today, some more interesting than others.

A lot of talk about users and communities which was to be expected. The talk be Tara Hunt was particularly good as was the stuff from last.fm. last.fm get around 15m scrobbles a day which is quite impressive along with 10m artists, 70m tracks and 17m items tagged they have some impressive figures. A 100% growth in staff over 8 months also shows how quickly they're on the move up.

The presentation on soocial.com, online contact management syncing to multiple devices was probably the most fun and gripping slot and it was only 10 minutes, that said the talk from the chap from zimki was very good on their JavaScript API application and of course pre-shaved yaks.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! didn't really say that much other than API's for it's product stack were being released soon. I suspect the first will be mail, but, we shall see.

Kevin Rose of digg announced support for openid which is cool and also had some great insight onto the stuff they want to do with real time tracking via flash of "swarms" around popular items and how users move around and what they're looking at.

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon had some interesting stuff to say about the web services they now offer in EC2, SGS and the S3 storage service and they certainly have some grunt behind them. The ability to loose more than one datacenter entirely and carry on is an impressive claim to make. The presentation was however a little dull.

Index Venture Capital I imagine would have been interesting to those interested! I wasn't one, but, there was good tips in there for looking for VC if you need it.

Another common theme on top of communities was don't scale up too quick in the early days and also not to get more money than you need.

All in all a good day. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Wifi properly sucks, seems Ryan Carson is annoyed, but, for a web conference should have been sorted out. Hey ho.

Chap from thinkfree.com didn't have much to say though the application they've developed and the viewer.thinkfree.com allowing you to put xls, doc, ppt on your site with MSO is very cool.

Quick talk from a Google guy who didn't really say much, just a quick overview on the fact they've got some api's and about the workshops they're holding tomorrow.

At the moment listening to the CTO from Amazon who so far is talking about some very high level resource model stuff. I get the feeling he might have quite a big brain and a bigger bank balance!

Very cool talk by chap from zimki, certainly had the audience interested and also looks like a good product as well. Still listening to a guy talking about Venutre Capital which really isn't that interesting.

Also a bit annoyed that there is no way of know which BT Open Zone voucher I actually used so may have used both already is very annoying.