Raw Notes from Future of Web Apps London 2009 – Day 2

Again these are just the short(ish) notes I made during the conference on stuff that caught my imagination, made me think or make me want to do more research on.

Future of Frontend Engineering

Hasn’t said anything whatsoever.
Twitter Labs launching
Open source stack
Build an API NOW

Future of the Cloud

Transition
Confusion managements trust security transparency
Lack of transparency – need to know whos providing layers
Cost of not using vs risks of using
commoditisation is driving towards a service based economy
too many providers at the moment to allow secutriy and interoperability of the platform
ubuntu supporting ec2 api and have ubuntu distro that provides same api
standardisation will happen
cloud not green
enterprises not ready
standardisation will lead to more innovation

Rails 3 and the Future of Agile

Defer decisions to the last responsible moment
Rails makes it easier to experiment with other techs
Ruby Rails Agile – yay

Mobile Widgets – meh

jil.org/vodaphone/appstar

Yahoo Geo

Border info and historical data. Removal of Vapids (Paris Hilton, Lewis Hamilton etc.)

Accessibilty

http://blog.gingertech.net/2009/08/03/aspects-of-video-accessibility/
Chrome Frame – accessibility black hole
Using s screen reader is tough

Marketing

Believe in your product. Best experience.
Not just founders and CEOs – whole company.
Consitency is state of mind
If you build it they will come is bullshit.
Be real. Be human. Admit mistakes – people will forgive you.
Qype have meetups – get their community involved – take them out and reach out to users – get all folk who’ve been to bars or vegetarian restaurants and invite them out.
New restaurant opens – email biggest reviewers. Then show this on the site?
Local as a platform. Needs to evolve.
Chilango had a buritto eating competition – awareness.
Create new identity from what your team values

The Future of Print Journalism

Fastcompany.com – launched on Drupal
Print – an elitist commodity – will cost more.
23 of 25 top news papers numbers decined
Craigslist and google killing print?
SodaHead – social news. Promoting news
Huffington Post – high FBConnect integraton
Digestable news
Glam Media – Tinker – apps for top conversations from twitter and facebook
Picure the impossible – newsy, get video for websites – service modes
Engagement new revenue streams
Where are kids viewing content?

Startup Metrics for Pirates

Keep it simple & actionable
fast, frequent iteration (& feedback)
measure conversion
focus on user experience
Progress is not equal to features
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Referral
Revenue
Product / Market Fit – if we took a feature a way would it matter?
Focus on critical few actionable metrics
Focus on stuff you already have – be brave enough to kill shit features.
Kill a feature every week. Iterate on the stuff that visitors really love.
Make a good product
Market the product
Make money
“You probably cant save your ass and your face at the same time so choose carefully.”

Practical Advice for Managing the Growth of your Web App

Efficiency != Scalability
App will eventually become i/o bound – cpu, db, disk, netowkr
Scalability means overcoming i/o boundries in financial terms
Working on scability is always beneficial – optimisation is sometimes beneficial
Premature optimisation is the root of all evil
Steve Souder books
Smaller – focus on scalability
Larger – focus on optimisation
Process 250k feeds every 45min
Adding hardware to go faster is trivial (but costs)
Could be more efficient (but resources best used elsewhere)
Facebook saved money by changing to commodity storage systems – efficiency savings implemented once implemented
Hal Henderson – Building Scalable Websites
Scalable Internet Architectures

http://go-test.it/fowa – > testing script