One of my favourite sessions was Banking the Unbanked: Opportunities for P2P in the U.S. and Developing World. Long interested in microfinance and mobile payments, it was great to hear some of the latest statistics and more detail about stories like M-PESA in Kenya. Basically M-PESA stole majority of the Kenyan market for money transfers in just 1 years time from Bus and Postal companies. A few of the interesting mentions in the session:

• 75% of the world’s phones are in the developing world
• Most of this 75% uses a prepaid service
• Just-in-time education is working when it comes to the underbanked
• People are using balances on their phones as a savings account
• Mobile is the first communication technology in the hands of more poor than rich
• 1 billion unbanked have mobile phones
• Cash to prepaid minutes has been a big success (see M-PESA)
• What other technologies will evolve that allow people to turn cash into online cash?
• Blue Label mentioned that In and Out channels are extremely important

During the VC Keynote on the second day, one of the speakers mentioned how in China today 95% of the business is being done as cash on delivery (COD). That said, they saw big opportunities right now in B2B payments, Prepaid and Overseas.

In the panel discussion on Digital Goods and Micropayments, the rep. from Offerpal shared that upon localizing their PayPal “Buy now” button, they saw an immediate 20% increase in conversions. Someone else mentioned that when they tested credit card only payments their conversions declined. There was general consensus that the more ways to pay the better – credit cards, PayPal, mobile etc.

The new APIs will definitely help streamline the user experience and there was big news around reduced cost if the buyer has funds on balance or is funding via bank transfer. Basically, where PayPal is able to cut costs on moving money in, they seem to be willing to cut costs in turn on money moving out to you.

Parts of the conference felt a bit heavy on the marketing, and the wifi was horrendous, but overall I think probably exceeded expectations on both sides.

I think PayPal has made a very smart move in reaching out (marketing to) the developer community. Those companies who can create a vibrant developer ecosystem can ride the wave of innovation from the crowd to a dominating market position as has been proven recently by Google, Facebook and Apple.

With all the flights I was also able to start and finish Paul Theroux’s Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. It was entertaining enough to keep me glued for 8 hours straight on the way to San Francisco.

Registration, originally uploaded by lectroidmarc.

Last week I was fortunate enough to take in the GoogleIO conference in San Francisco. This was google’s first developer conference – a quick 2 day event. As you can see from the photo, the event was well attended. Some take-aways from this past week:

• GWT really should be evaluated on any project with aggressive javascript/ajax use.
• Translation API mixed with crowdsourced editing is a very interesting global strategy
• Steve Souders is diving deep into performance bottlenecks and his presentations are must reads.
• Storage API coming soon to google maps allows you to free your user generated geodata, allowing it be found more easily via google search.
• Android, running on hardware similar to iphone, with streetview maps and overlays would really solve the local promotions/coupon problem
• Still no gdata access to search Youtube via geo. Having this for Picassa might actually take some market share from flickr.
• Google Gears makes me want to find a problem that needs offline access as part of the solution.
• Once they crack facebook, there will only be one choice: opensocial
• The visualization api has a number of interesting components – intensity maps with events would really come in handy

Audience, originally uploaded by duncandavidson.

A photo of myself and Jamie Zettle (I’m behind the guy in focus – in the green shirt) at the Tools of Change conference in San Jose last week.

It was interesting to compare the SD Best Practices conference (put together by the Dr. Dobb’s group) with the Emerging Technology conference (put together by O’Reilly) from this past year. I felt the ETech conference was a higher energy, better attended, and more visionary conference whereas the SDBP lacked buzz but was more focused on real world situations and problems faced by those of us working in larger enterprises. A familiar scene at Etech was small groups of participants huddled together after sessions, exchanging ideas and brainstorming new approaches. At SDExpo this wasn’t the case – in my experience to compare the two conferences is to compare working at a start-up vs. working at a multinational. If you’re looking to push the limits of the Web or are looking for inspiration, Etech would be your better bet. If you are looking for ideas to improve your modified agile development process or need to improve your ability to deliver use cases or user scenarios – SDExpo would be your choice. Of course this is an over simplified view and both conferences had their share of brilliance. Enough with trying to compare apples and oranges…

The conference was organized into a number of tracks – requirements & analysis, testing & quality, process & methods, people & teams and so on. My observation over the 4 days was that the requirements & analysis ‘classes’ were very well attended but almost all the others were at most near 25% capacity. If you open the thumbnail I’ve inserted here you can see what I mean. Plenty of room – was attendance below expectations or were the rooms not properly sized? Either way, the relative emptiness really lowered the energy and decreased the discussion.

Before I move on to the sessions themselves – one other thing that bothered me about SDBP was the lack of openness and planning for collaboration on the Web. Where Etech pushed discussion post sessions via blogging and tagging – SDBP didn’t facilitate any of this and actually squirreled conference presentations away behind password prompts. If I was a presenter at SDBP, I’d certainly be pushing them to open up the resources section – free those ideas, why wouldn’t you want to engage the Web? It seems Dr. Dobb’s is still very much ‘old school’ in their thinking about the conference as a set of ‘classes’ and not an exchange of ideas.

Okay, so after all of this you may be getting the impression that I wouldn’t go back next year – but not so. The sessions themselves were for the most part excellent, challenging my thoughts on a number of subjects and I definitely took away a number of things I could implement into my teams right away. Below are my thoughts on some of the sessions I attended:

Agile Model-Driven Development – Scott Ambler
Surprisingly (because Scott is on the conference advisory board and also an editor with Dr. Dobb’s), Scott was one of my least favorite speakers of the conference – his presentation style left me feeling that Scott was a ‘black and white’ kind of guy and I actually thought he offended a number of people in the audience. I should have predicted this at the onset as Scott opened his session by telling us how someone stormed out of his last session – and how this person was clearly an idiot. Here were a few quotes Scott threw out during his presentation:

• “..writing requirements early in the software development process is actually demonstrating incompetence..”
• Addressing an audience member – “Let me guess, you’re in software quality right? Another over-specialized person…”
• “Why have acceptance tests and requirements documents? QA just copies and pastes!”

Even though I disagreed with how Scott put some of his points, in most cases I did agree with the underlying ideas. He did bring a common sense and blunt approach with a fresh perspective to some of the aspects of traditional development – arguing against ideas such as BRUF (Big Requirements Up Front) and traditional change management (or as Scott suggested – change prevention) implementations. I particularly liked Scott’s discussion of Change cases.

Developing .NET Software Properly – Christian Gross
I only caught the last half of Christian’s session – but his discussion of .NET Generics and NullableParser was a good overview to some of the nice additions to .NET 2.0

Scenario-Driven Development – Granville Miller
Granville (Randy) works on the Visual Studio Team System project with Microsoft. Randy argued that scenarios are an effective way to capture requirements within an agile process. He showcased some of the artifact templates available within MSF (Microsoft Solutions Framework) – of which some like the Vision template would be applicable to almost any project. While none of the ideas were revolutionary, Randy presented some effective techniques for capturing scenarios via defining the vision, the personas, the and the user goals.

Effective Aspect-Oriented Programming – Rod Bodkin
Prior to this session I hadn’t much exposure to AOP. Rod walked us through AOP using AspectJ. For elements or functions that ‘cross cut’ or span many of your application classes – such as logging or exception handling – aspect oriented programming is very appealing. And the fact of the matter is that almost every application has a number of these elements – leading me to believe that AOP will very soon be a staple in every programmer’s ‘toolbox’ just as OOP is today. AOP allows you to encapsulate features – to be plugged/unplugged or enabled/disabled at build or runtime. Rod demonstrated how AOP can be used to reduce code duplication as well as warn on architectural policy violations (eg. calling business layer from data layer). I found this part especially interesting given that it always seems to be a battle to monitor all members of the team for compliance to basic architectural standards. The only downside to Rod’s talk was that it was entirely Java centric – and when asked about related .NET projects, Rod wasn’t able to share much guidance.

Introducing Problem-Frames – Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
I wasn’t able to take away much from this presentation – the real-world applicability seemed limited given that the modeling diagrams seemed at the same time both too simplistic and also hard to interpret. The highlight of this session for me was when Rebecca, in getting an audience member involved for an example interaction, asked “Would you mind being a human?” It is moments like these that remind me that I’m moving in a very special crowd when I’m at these developer’s conferences.

Introduction to Holacracy – Brian Robertson
Brian was a very interesting guy and a very engaging high energy speaker. Brian has his own company and uses the principles of Holacracy in his own organization. Holacracy is a system of practices – used to transform organizations – with promises of engaged employees and business agility. One of the core ideas is that a company is much like the human body – a greater whole made up of self-governing smaller wholes. I couldn’t help but feel that the practices, while practical, were also a bit utopian – easier implemented in a smaller company with fewer complexities.

Web 2.0 acceptance testing tools and techniques – Jeff Nielsen & Bob Payne
Jeff and Bob were very entertaining – were these guys a comedy duo before getting into QA? They started with why you would want to automate functional testing then moved to creation of a decision matrix for selecting the best tool. It always amazes me how many companies evaluate software without having such a matrix in place. Jeff and Bob summarized some of the tools available for Web 2.0 (think heavy Ajax) testing currently – htmlunit, Canoo WebTest, QTP, Selenium, FitNesse, WATIR, and Longboard. They gave a real running demo of a suite of tests in Selenium. If you have QA specialists who are able to write code – WATIR looks very powerful – ruby based, controlling IE via COM. Selenium is a little simpler in terms of constructing tests and is completely browser based. Love the geek humor – Selenium is the element used to detoxify Mercury.

Writing Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements – Mike Cohn
Mike gave an excellent session on perfecting user stories – regardless of whether or not you are using an agile process. Some points I thought worth noting:

• A story can be broken down into 3 parts: Card (Story), Conversation (Notes after a talk with the product owner/customer), and Confirmation (the acceptance tests). If you make the conversation standard you ensure you keep talking to the customer.
• We tend to write stories for “The User”. Of course this is BS, as there is never one ‘user’. We should define the different roles (or personas as others may call them) and use them when defining stories.
• Users don’t know the answers – involve them, but don’t ask them for solutions – use participatory design. An example, you don’t tell the doctor how to solve the pain in your abdomen – you ask them for the solution. Same concept.
• Good stories are independent, negotiable, valuable, estimatable, sized appropriately and testable
• Use cases are not user stories.

Creating change one tic-tac at a time – Alistair Cockburn & Jeffrey Fredrick
When organizations attempt to change their process there is inevitably a period of productivity loss. During this ‘pain period’ many might abandon the new process if the payback is perceived to be too far away. As change agents, we need to ensure the expectation of this dip is set from the onset. One strategy they recommend is to run through the entire new process on a small scale – an ‘extreme hour’. This will help eliminate confusion and show that the new process is possible.

I’ve run project retrospectives on many occasions, and I liked the approach Jeffrey and Alistair recommend in terms of focusing on the positives only. Use ‘worked well’ and ‘try next time’ instead of ‘worked well’ and ‘needs improvement’. They are correct when they say that the team often gets stuck on the ‘needs improvement’ list.

They also touched on small rewards vs. big rewards and how small ‘meaningless’ rewards have the better result. If you do X and receive $5k, subconsciously you know you did it for the money. If you do X and receive a small token (sticker, bobblehead whatever), subconsciously you know you didn’t do it for that meaningless reward but rather because you know it is the right thing to do. This approach seems to work best when markers are socially visible.

Business Rules – Mary Gorman
Mary introduced the IIBA – The International Institute of Business Analysis. She discussed how to break out business policies from rules and also how to break rules out from use cases. This last part is particularly important – it is true that most use cases I’ve seen contain business rules embedded within them, stitched in all over the place. If you can remove the business rules from the use cases you attain modularity and can reduce rework as business rules tend to change more often. Mary also talked about strategies for keeping the business rules, use cases and data definitions in separate repositories and merging them on the fly into a single document for the development team – as we all know developers hate jumping from one document to the other. Examples illustrated rules defined using English language and pseudo code.

Making .NET and Java work together – Ted Neward
Ted’s session was one of my favorites at SDBP. Ted threw away the slides and basically conducted a group conversation – mixing questions with example code and demos. Ted really took us through a deep dive – he’s got an extremely deep technical understanding of both platforms. I hadn’t looked at ikvm before this session – and I was blown away at the demonstration. ikvm gives you a Java Virtual Machine implemented in .NET, a .NET implementation of the Java class libraries, and the ability to compile java byte code to CIL.

Discussion also included Juggernet and JNbridge. I will be downloading Lutz Roeder’s Reflector for .NET after seeing it used in this session.

In discussions about VMWare, Ted mentioned some MSFT friends who have been running Windows inside Parallels on the new MacBook Pros and getting better performance than non virtual installation on a Thinkpad. Not sure if it is true, but if so – I really have to look at getting that MacBook.

openUP Distilled – Brian Lyons & Per Kroll
Download the process and start contributing. “OpenUP/Basic is an iterative software development process that is minimal, complete, and extensible.” – a great initiative. Eventually, RUP may be implemented as plugin modules on top of openUP. Other process practices could also be implemented as plugin modules. Brian and Per showcased the downloadable framework which included process diagrams, role definitions and more. This was driven out of real-world experiences of developing eclipse. I think it is about time that we have a project like this mature – so that development teams can have a process framework available in an open climate – and so that modifications can be contributed back as plugins. We don’t re-invent the wheel when it comes to code – why are we still doing it to a greater degree with development process artifacts?

Balancing traditional and agile project management – Sonja Koppensteiner
I really enjoyed Sonja’s talk – and based on comments from the audience, Sonja really connected with many of the management in attendance that don’t live in the perfect purist world and have implemented a customized process for their development. I always get a kick out of the speakers who ask ‘Who here does XP’, ‘Who does SCRUM’, ‘Who does RUP’ – when in reality I’ve never been part of a company that practices a purist version of any of the processes. In reality, everyone uses a modified process – the scope or magnitude of the modifications is the variable. That is of course how it should be – organizations should be constantly refining their processes to find the perfect solution for their unique circumstances, culture etc. Sonja introduced some good models for evaluating each project – to find the elements from ‘traditional’ methodologies you should adopt together with the elements from ‘agile’ methodologies. I think once the Agile hype dies down a little, there will be more focus on this space as we balance back to picking the best from each process style to find the optimal solution for each individual project.

Etech Audience, originally uploaded by x180.

First Carsten Bormann on ‘A Disconnection-tolerant AJAX library’ followed by Steve Yan on ‘Web Apps without the Web’.
Carsten demonstrated his work so far on ‘Panic-mode’, his library for dealing with frequently connected computing and AJAX on the Web. As part of his presentation he walked through best practices for AJAX development. A few elements I took note of – updating location.hash to support bookmarking, keeping cookies below 4kb for best results and using cookies or flash 8 local storage to deal with browser crashes.

Steve Yan demonstrated his latest work on Num Sum and TrimJunction. Num Sum is a Web based spreadsheet application and TrimJunction is a port of RoR into Javascript. In terms of pushing technical boundaries, I think Steve might have my vote for tops of Etech 2006. The way he’s created an implementation of SQL using Javascript (and that’s just the start) blew my mind. Steve’s work was a great follow up to Carsten’s in that he demonstrated how a user could ‘Save As’ (using normal browser file menu) the Web spreadsheet to the local filesystem, work on it offline, then resync it later when reconnected to the network. Very powerful and user friendly stuff. By writing your Web app using TrimJunction, the promise is that you get write once, run everywhere (client or server).

Julian Bleeker was next – speaking on ‘Pervasive Electronic Games’. I’ve often wished I had more time to spend hacking on next gen mobile games, so it was great to get an overview of what has been going on in this space over the past year. Given that everyone seems to have a camera phone these days I’ve got to think if there is any low hanging fruit to trial in Toronto. Julian mentioned a few interesting games using photo capabilities – one whereby users power up by scanning bar codes, another whereby users gain points by scanning others photos and having others scan theirs (pyramid scheme). Lots of examples of ‘hide and seek’ – especially under the geocaching banner. The whole audience then got to participate in a trial – everyone dialed in and using their keypads controlled their own character (shape) on screen. Julian’s push is to get people engaged in way that doesn’t leave them staring at their tiny mobile screen but rather up and connecting with others. I scribbled down a quote from Julian today that I thought was great – “In my world nothing is ever done. Everything is an iteration.”

Yahoo presented later in the morning – showcasing their vision for the future of search (it’s social). “Better search through people”. Bradley Horowitz walked the crowd through the Yahoo acquisitions of recent – and in the process highlighted some of the special things that are changing the way content is created. As an example, instead of users explicitly ranking photos in flickr so that the system can determine interestingness, the ranking is created implicitly by storing details of regular usage and traffic patterns. While not entirely new, I don’t think this approach is ubiquitous yet. If I can take one idea away from the Yahoo presentation for implementation in my own group – that would be that of Yahoo’s ‘Hack Day’ where all staff are given a day to build on top of their existing products to spur innovation.

After Yahoo was Mark Hunt – debuting his new application gootodo. This might have been the ‘longest’ presentation I saw during the conference – why Mark ended up with almost an hour of time where we had other presenters being cut off after 15 minutes I don’t understand. As I’d already listened to the GTD audio book, it seemed like Mark was basically giving David Allen’s speech. And even though we were experiencing network difficulties (as we did all week – the capactiy just wasn’t adequate for the size of the group), when Mark did have connectivity he seemed hesitant to dive into the application. At certain points I wanted to run up to the front of the room and login him in myself so that we could finally get a look at what he’s come up with. To be fair, when Mark finally did show us the application – he had implemented some really great ideas. One such idea was the ability to add to-dos using email, including the ability to postdate to-dos into the future using different system email address (eg. tuesday@gootodo.com). Very clever and effective.

After lunch Scott Berkun was up – someone who I really wanted to see after I’d purchased his book on project management and started following his blog. His session was focused on user interface design (not project management) and elicited lots of debate. Some key ideas Scott presented – we are creating a mashup matrix on the Web right now but it is mostly data centric not user centric, human memory is expensive and we shouldn’t bloat up our requirements, and in many of the mapping mashups we are putting emphasis on the map for the cool factor even though the tabular data is more important to the user. Scott dissected a couple case studies as part of his presentation – one of Edward Tufte‘s diagrams (as the crowd contained lots of Web/HCI folk they were familiar with the work) and also the Tag Cloud from the O’Reilly Radar website. With each he dissected the implementation and recommended a course for analysis and improvement. For each case, at least a half dozen audience members took to defending the existing design and questioning Scott’s reasoning. Entertaining and very illustrative of the challenges that we face when doing interface design everyday.

Last up, and the end of my blogging for a few days at least ;>, was Jason and Danny from the EFF. They went over 10 possible cases we might see in the next couple years – ‘RIAA vs. ?’ was, as to be expected, one of them. The guys were really entertaining – I now understand just how important the work is that they are doing out there.

So that’s it. Stick a fork in Etech 2006. Probably the most interesting conference I’ve attended to date – I’ll really be trying to make it back for 2007.

Post Mapquest session I took a quick tour of the vendor booths and then headed back to the hotel (which I would more accurately describe as a hostel – thankfully its only a week). At the Attensa booth I chatted with a guy about their new product offering – all the time thinking ‘where do I know this guy from?’. This morning it came to me – it was Rich Rudolph who I’d worked with at webHancer. I’ve also noticed quite a few familiar faces from the w3c conference in Hawaii a few years ago – I really do need to get some device that helps me with names. Haven’t had a chance to play with the Attensa software yet but their messaging was bang on.

This morning started with Jon Udell – who within five minutes had me reaching for a scribble pad to make a note to self about correcting our site page titles. He showcased an interesting slider implementation on wikipedia allowing you to move through diffs quickly and effectively. I’m really going to have see if I can reproduce this for browsing VSS/CVS/SVN repositories. The other very interesting thing he showcased was a URL attention over time graph – showing raw # of social bookmarks over time and also when certain key influencer individuals took note of the URL in question. Think stock history graph but for a URL in the new ‘attention economy’.

Clay Shirky was next – reminding us how we are all political – by nature of us creating the applications being used to share information in the digital age. As software developers we are building the tools that ensure values such as freedom of expression are respected. Later he showcased Slashdot as an example of a site whereby select site members form a protective membrane over the site’s valuable content. A small group of volunteer moderators rank comments to provide filtration. This keeps the site managable and relevant.

Adobe launched a new javascript/flash (read flash/ajax) integration kit – reminder that flash has 98% penetration, more than any particular browser or browser version. It is easy to forget that on the client, flash is the most univeral sandbox one can leverage. One powerful demo illustrated push from server to the client page (via DOM) using a flash intermediary. Where flash by itself is undesirable for a number of reasons, and ajax alone can’t enable things like push – the combination of the two seems to have real potential.

Brian from eventdb/eventful was a particular draw for me – esp. given that we at Semaview had been focused on the open event space since before eventdb was formed. While we approached it from the thick client angle with the majority of development going into the construction of the eventSherpa Windows software (reminder you can still download a crippled version without the integrated web hosting), Brian and team went about it from the Web services model. Ah hindsight. I really like what they’ve come up with – the seperation of the commercial application (eventful) from the open and free web service (evdb) seems to balance nicely. Brian launced their ‘demand it’ functionality today – enabling users to harness their collective power to request events. Demand aggregation – a key component of the ‘attention economy’.

I was really looking forward to finally hearing Joel Spolsky speak – he ripped into some of the recently launched services/sites, including (very quickly) the new Windows Live service by Microsoft. His point was that everyone was copying the look n’ feel of google (fonts, colors etc.) and missing the boat. You can’t just slap lipstick on the pig. He stressed a few key points – obsess on aesthetics and always think about emotions. If you can evoke emotional responses – you’ve done it. (Everytime I login to Windows Live Mail, it definately evokes an emotional response from me when I have to navigate around that HUGE banner at the top of the screen. It just ain’t the emotion you’d be hoping for.)

As is appropriate, right after the break it was Microsoft up to present the new Windows Live service. First mistake IMO – the presenter comes up with a full suit and tie. I think he’s the only presenter here that I’ve seen do so. In a room full of alpha-geeks you don’t want to be the only guy in a suit. Immediately it had the feeling of a sales pitch – and my impression was that the crowd wasn’t buying, despite some pretty impressive new functionality. One thing that looked very cool was their 45 degree aerial photos and 360 degree street level photos for Seattle. Let’s get that up in Canada please.

So what is this ‘attention economy’ that the conference is themed on? Michael Goldhaber presented his take. His position was that beginning in the 80s, we’ve shifted to a new paradigm where attention is the new currency. Once a society reaches a certain plateau and money is no longer the most important issue we jump to the next stage where attention is most desired. Instead of workers/employers we are fans/stars. Meaning in life is derived from shared meaning with others which is in turn derived from attention. I can’t do the presentation justice here – but it definately tied the conference theme in and was ample food for thought.

Yahoo is building a ‘tribal platform’. Tribes pay attention. I think they’ve got the right idea. They moved through them quickly but I’m looking forward to the release of their full UI design pattern library.

Jen King gave an interesting presentation on RFID. Staggering costs involved in embedding RFID into US passports. Scary to see that one may be able to read someone’s passport data from as far away as 30 feet. I can just imagine the havoc that’s going to be created when US citizens travel abroad and have their personal details lifted in the town squares.

Aggregate Knowledge has an interesting new product that enabled any site to have a recommendation engine similar to some of what you see on amazon. ‘Users who buy this, also buy that’ – both on your site and across domains. Very powerful stuff – I latched on to their point about recommendation navigation becoming primary navigation over taxonomy/search, this does seem to hold true when we consider learnings from the social applications. Another plus of this product – no up front fees to try it and pay per conversion when implemented. Low barrier to entry.

Lastly (yes it was a full day), Lee Bryant presented on humanizing the enterprise. I found their approach interesting – in that they typically do not try and convince upper management to throw away cumbersome software already in place (think sharepoint) but rather keep the legacy applications for storage and simply build a new UI layer on top to enable social interactions. This allows management to ‘save face’ when confronted with the large implemenation costs they incurred in past but still allows the company to move foward with new ideas/learnings. Lee showcased Wikilaw as an example of new technologies taking hold in old businesses. One question that was raised for me – is their a commercial sharepoint webpart to enable social tagging within sharepoint? Another interesting thought Lee raised – that enterprises need the equivalent of the wikigardeners we see out on the Web.

All in all – another great day of sessions. Too bad we couldn’t extend it past tomorrow.

(Note: After losing half this post due to a browser hiccup, I realize just how much I rely on Gmail’s draft save feature. If I’m missing a WordPress plugin that enables this please let me know. If it hasn’t yet been created – someone really needs to get on that.)

Etech Audience, originally uploaded by x180.

Ray Ozzie demonstrated a prototype of copy n’ paste for the Web – showing how easy it should be (could be) for users to move data from one Web silo er site to another. Below it all though is common agreed upon, adhered to, data standards such as iCalendar or vCard etc. Given the slow uptake of formats other than RSS (iCalendar might be the next bright spot), I’m not sure we are all that close to this – but every year it gets a little more close to being realized. As always, amusing to see a MSFT demo using firefox. One thing that did really spark me from his presentation today was the idea of ‘everything is a feed’. Exposing as much data as possible via RSS really takes it to the next level when it comes to remixes/mashups.

Jeff Han presented next – looks like it might not be long until we all have our minority report drag n’ drop translucent interfaces. I was blown away at his photo, video, globe demos. Having something like this at home (imagining it on my coffee table or wall) could force me to start building desktop applications again – away from the Web Services model it seems most attention is on these days.

Dick Hardt, formerly of ActiveState and Canadian, gave what was one of the most entertaining presentations so far. He rattled off 1 slide per second – keeping everyone engaged and also getting across his key ideas around identity management. It is a tough space, hopefully they’ll succeed where so many others have failed.

Felix Miller from last.fm gave an overview of their service – not sure why I haven’t plugged into this one yet. He mentioned over 1 billion data points collected last year – with users doing the bulk of the work in terms of cleaning that data. Lots to learn here about harnessing the community and then rewarding them with collective intelligence.

Seth Goldstein unvieled the lastest skin to Root markets – possibly the only spyware I’ll install willingly ;> Think WebTrends for your personal internet usage (amongst other things). Being able to access a dashboard report indicating where I am wasting my time online would be very helpful indeed.

A presentation on Second Life blew my mind – the lines are getting fuzzy when users are creating games to be played inside a game (virtual world) and then selling that IP to market the game back in the physical world. Cory mentioned users generating 2.5 million lines of code per year. That’s one large, distributed, virtual development team.

Didn’t enjoy the presentation from David Sifry (Technorati) as much – didn’t find much meat. To be fair – it must be difficult to cram content into 15 minutes.

Disappointment of the day was a Greasemonkey presentation by Mark Pilgrim. He swaggered back and forth at the front of the room – seeming rather disinterested at times. At one point he put up a slide indicating he probably wouldn’t right another line of javascript again – certainly didn’t get me excited about the future of Greasemonkey. As Mark put it – the future holds, well, ‘more of the same’.

Cal mentioned a few things that surprised me about Flickr:

• No formal QA resources, the dev team performed testing. I’ll love to take this nugget back to my current dev team ;>
• Releases frequently throughout the day (every 30 minutes – now that’s Agile). Enabled by a fully automated deployment process – the one big button. Looks like they created something in house, similar to Rails Switchtower but for PHP.
• Non-federated databases up until the Yahoo acquisition. They pushed MySQL beyond what I thought it was capable of.
• Staffing remains below 15 even up to today.

On to the keynotes – I’d never heard Tim O’Reilly speak before – he was entertaining and charismatic, encouraging the audience to ‘keep hacking’. It’s too bad he ran short on time, I’d like to have heard more from him.

I found Bruce Sterling to be the most thought provoking of the day – his keynote on the ‘Internet of Things‘ left me pondering on how change and new thinking moves its way through our culture. He definately has given me a perspective I hadn’t had until today. I’ll have to grab a copy of his latest book when the conference is over.

Looks like it will be a very inspiring week.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve never seen so many Apple notebooks – at first I thought it was a prerequisite to attendance that I missed ;> Early pet peeve is lack of seating in the conference foyers, people wanting to sit around and login are having to sprawl out on the floor.

Check out the Flickr event photo stream when you have a chance.