The guys at Carsonified recently updated the page of the Future of Web Apps conference to include an archive of online slideshows and mp3 presentations. I was under the impression that they had also filmed some presentations, but I can’t seem to find any of these videos.

For now though, if you weren’t able to attend FOWA, you can now listen and watch to some of the presentations online and see what you missed. I’m personally actually going to go through a few of these as I obviously wasn’t able to attend all of the parallel sessions.

Matthew Mullenweg, founding father of Wordpress, had some nice insights on how to scale your business as a webstartup during FOWA. His presentation (to be found here) ranged from the technical side of scaling to the business side of scaling. In this business side he had some interesting insides that I a) didn’t know Wordpress did and b) hadn’t even ever thought about doing.

When we talk about Wordpress there are two products that can be recognized; Wordpress.org is the software that you can run on your own server, and Wordpress.com is the hosted solution for the less tech savvy people amongst us. When talking about scaling his business, Matt was talking about Wordpress.com which was gained users in exponential rate in the last few years.

Obviously at a certain time, any web application developer and decent entrepreneur will consider advertisement. In the age of Google with their Google-Adsense, ads have proven to be a successful stream of revenue for webapps, especially if your app has a big uptake on traffic. Still, many entrepreneurs that started with a social concept and a gathered a solid community will be hesitant about subjecting their loyal users to ads. As a result some find a different source of revenue (selling your statistics?) while others make Pro packages that let users get rid of the ads.

Wordpress.com went in an other direction when they made a clear distinction between loyal users and people reaching their blogs by accident. They noticed that a certain big percentage of their page visits came through search engines like Google. Clearly these people were already presented with ads at those points and adding the same kind of adds to the Wordpress page could be leveraged as some kind of second-level advertising. The cool thing about this though is, that by only offering these ads to people coming from the search engines, the loyal users and readers of Wordpress.com blogs were spared the advertisements and the annoyance.

The logic behind all this is pretty solid. People searching for something might actually be interested in the relevant product that is presented in the ads next to the articles. Loyal readers though will most of the time come to the site no matter what the content was as they are more interested in the user that writes the blog. This is enhanced by the effect that RSS feeds have on people actually being loyal readers no matter what someone writes.

Therefore, only offering ads to the people that are proven to be more likely to click on them makes perfect sense. The result is that when you are a Wordpress.com author or loyal reader, you will rarely even know there are ads.

Thank you Matt for this cool idea, and for saving us bloggers from a world of advertisements!

One of the talks at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) showed me a way to use OpenID that I hadn’t realize yet. Many people, when they think of OpenID, think of it as a way to log in a.k.a. authenticate themselves towards a system. Clearly you could give them anything you want as long as you give them the same OpenID every time you drop by.

Matt Biddulph from Dopplr though, showed some ways how OpenID could be used beyond authentication. Dopplr for example lets you add more than one OpenID account to your Dopplr account, which enables you to login to Dopplr with any OpenID provider. This becomes quite redundant when you add more than two OpenIDs, but Matt Biddulp showed that you can use people’s OpenID for more purposes besides authentication.

I already knew, you could use an OpenID to verify that a person is simply a member of a certain group of people. Much like you could use your student card to get discount at a cinema, an OpenID from your university would show that you are a student. Extending on this your national OpenID could prove your nationality, and your corporate OpenID could prove the company you work for.

Note that the actual identity of the user is not relevant and doesn’t really need to be checked as only the type of the OpenID is the important part. Even better, there is no extension like XRI needed to make this even work.

+

A second example though showed how OpenID+Microformats would be able to give any application a nice read-only API. Imagine that you have an app, and you would like to give your user a simple way to add their friends from their other networks. A simple way to do this would be to let the user provide the OpenIDs of some other networks. Checking with the OpenID server if this OpenID really belongs to that user would be enough for you to then simply fetch the Microformatted contact lists from their profile pages on those sites, and compare that info with your own list of users.

Many networks like Twitter and Jaiku already present their friend lists using Microformats, but they don’t yet provide their users with an OpenID login that would allow any other app to actually verify if user X on your application is actually user Y on that other site. Currently Dopplr just scrapes your Twitter profile page for friends when you give them a username, so you could give them any name you want, but if Twitter would become an OpenID provider than they could use this to check if you are really that person on that network.

[More brainstorming on combining Microformats and OpenID]

In my time in London I have attended quite a few talks from Amazon people on their EC2 service that allows you to have an Elastic Computing Cloud, which can quickly scale up when your webservice lifts off, gets Dugg, or ends up on Slashdot. This cloud is easily scalable and the cool thing is that you only pay for the server power/storage/bandwidth that you use. At every one of these talks by Amazon though, people had two issues with EC2:

1. The physical hosting is located in the US, which means that any data you will store will fall under US copyright laws. Some people had some serious issues with this.
2. EC2 doesn’t really offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which means that they might take the service temporarily or permanently offline whenever they feel like it. This is obviously a risk to any business and means that people have been looking for alternatives.

One of the new alternatives is FlexiScale by the UK based company Xcalibre. A few startups like Huddle have already used their scalable servers and profited from their benefits when the product gained popularity. For a few bucks a month you can get a wide range of server options, fully scalable in storage, power, and numbers. Obviously they DO offer a SLA which means that this service is reliable for business.

The only problem I had was that their minimum option was still a bit expensive for me as a young/student developer to play with. I talked with the CEO Tony Lucas about this and he was willing to consider smaller packages as scaling down would be just as easy to them as scaling up. I’m looking forward to what they come up with.

FOWA is all about webapps, so I was amazed to see a stand that had a cool piece of software running in Mac OS X. The company is Blurb, and their self publishing tool runs on both Windows and Mac. The choice for an offline editor for an online service is interesting but in the end actually quite understanding.

In a time of webapplications that make you order your businesscards using Flickr photos, and order your self published books via Lulu, it has become common practice to have an online editor for these physical products. Still, on the other hand there are tools like iPhoto and Picasa that make it more of a pleasure to use your photo library to make a physical product without doing the editing in a sometimes not perfect webapp. The BookSmart software of Blurb takes the middle road, allowing people to use online and offline libraries to publish via the webservice by Blurb.

The actual really thing that I noticed abotu Blurb was the fact that it is dirty cheap. Melinda and I have been looking at some other websites like QOOP to make a photobook or calendar for our parents for christmas, and the Blurb service is simply way cheaper. The quality is really good, as they had a wide range of their books lying around. They even did the “24 hours of Flickr” book, so the photo quality is guaranteed to be good.A simple softcover (18×18cm, 20-40 pages) photobook that you can style yourself will set you back €9.95, a large hardcover version (33×28cm, 20-40 pages) will cost you about €41,95. Compare this to QOOP this is at least €10 cheaper. More prices can be found here. Shipping is from Amsterdam, and if you use the promo code “FOWA” you will even get the shipping costs for free!

The only problem for now is that I can’t seem to get the BookSmart software to work with iPhoto ‘08, but I have reported the bug. I hope to show my first book someday soon.

I just noticed that another Future of Web Apps attendee “Second Brain“, much like MeeCard, was focussing on aggregating your online life (aka lifestream). I hadn’t noticed them in the two days and wonder if they were even there. This company though has made it’s service public already which makes analyzing and reviewing it a bit easier.

Unlike MeeCard and more like Jaiku, this app focusses a bit more on creating an online lifestream for you to share to others. I therefore would miss the option to use this site as an online businesscard (with lifestream aggregation). Further more I noticed there is no “aggregated” RSS feed that your friends could subscribe to, which would make it probably a more useful tool (add a new feed to you aggregation and your friends will be subscribed instantly!).It seems to be a cool trend of sites (I even have another one that I will review soon) that try and make it interesting for people with an active online social life to have one local repository to share their information and lifestreams. Still, I can’t see one that makes it a business.

So, the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference is over, and it were 2 amazing days. This conference was quite an impressive one and I thank the guys behind Carsonified for giving me the opportunity to attend for free. I plan to do a few “roundups” of some of the exhibitors that were presenting, and this first one is on MeeCard.

I actually had a similar idea to MeeCard a while back when I ran into troubles with my MooCards that had 3 urls on it. I realized that it would make sense to have one central place online where people can find you, your lifestream, your details and your external links on all other websites, without having that content all on your own website. I decided to write something like this as an experiment for me to learn Ruby on Rails but never got much further than this.

The idea behind Meecard (example) is to have one online card that you can “configure” yourself and have it show your lifestream, links to your accounts, personal info, and basically anything more. They haven’t gone public yet so I am hoping to some beta access soon and give it a real try, as it sounds interesting and I would like to see how configurable it is.

I never really went into taking my personal project that seriously, as I noticed in a few discussions with friends that it was pretty hard to get a businessmodel around this. When I asked the same question to the MeeCard guys they noted that they hadn’t really thought about that either.

It’s less than 10 hours to the start of the Future of Web Apps conference in London, and I started to think about some interesting things to ask all the startups at the expo. I decided that, instead of asking the obvious things like “what does your app do?” it might be more interesting to focus on some of the bad issues we have with web applications these days. Here are the 10 probably really interesting questions (in no particular order) we will be asking at FOWA tomorrow:

1. Why would we really need this application?
2. Do I need to login to Facebook before I can use your application?
3. Do I need a Twitter account before I can use your application?
4. What other company does your corporate logo feel close to?
5. Do I need to register before I can even look at your application?
6. Do I need to re-add all my friends when I join your site?
7. If I join, will you start spamming my friends with invites?
8. If you get bought, will you screw over your users?
9. If you get bought, will you screw over your users?
10. Does your mom understand how to use your app?

Got more questions we should ask, then add them to the comments before tomorrow.

The holidays have been over for a while now and life has picked up again with a ruthless schedule. Here’s a quick schedule update from us to tell you what is keeping us busy at the moment and where you can expect us the coming year. If I forget something, I’m sure that the rest will add it themselves.

Reinier

Reinier is currently finalizing all arrangements to be able to launch his startup Tipit.to. To say that this consumes a lot of his time is an understatement.

Cristiano

Cristiano used to be our top blogger but he is currently directing more time to his studies. He is currently busy writing academic prose with the hopes of graduating sometime in the future.

Martijn

Martijn has also focused a lot of his attention back to his studies but he (and we) also came to the realization that blogging is not his thing. That is why we decided to part on amicable terms. We wish Martijn well for the future.

Eelke

Eelke has settled into Berlin and is feeling quite at home from what I understand. He has produced some great movie clips on his own blog in the past days. Eelke is pursuing work in the Berlin area, so if you want to hire a great designer there, you should look him up (his new professional site should be up soon).

Alper

I am undergoing numerous changes in my life with a graduation due this Friday, a change of jobs and a new house. In this new life a lot of my time is spent working on experience and promotion for Tipit.to or doing web projects for Boost Company. I do have more bandwidth available and will be putting up a professional site soon.

Events

And to finish this update here is a slightly annotated event schedule for the rest of this year. You can always track us on Upcoming, browse through my contacts for the other Four Starters members. You should be able to find most of us on Dopplr as well (my profile).

PICNIC (25/9 — 28/9) is going on right now. Something of an overhyped event it is hard not to be influenced by it. Reinier is going tomorrow to take a masterclass in pitching from Boris and then onto pitch for a jury. This Friday is a meeting on portable social networks (upcoming) which I’m debating not going to.

FOWA (upcoming) Ryan Carson’s visit to Amsterdam was a great appetizer for the real event in London next month. Cristiano will attend the event and report back for us.

The future of GOOGLE (upcoming) This event should at least be interesting where Dutch ‘pundits’ are going to ruminate about the future of Google. I am positively influenced because it is at Info.nl.

Wikimedia (upcoming) The Dutch Wikimedia conference should be interesting and I plan to attend.

Barcamp Berlin (upcoming) Barcamps are among my favorite events and this promises to be a great one. Because of the subsequent Web2.0Expo event international attendance should be at a peak level. Now just to hope that the venue is big enough to hold all of us. This should be no problem in Berlin, right? Eelke and myself will definitely attend this.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin (upcoming) Big multi-day conference for everybody into the web scene in Europe. This promises to be jam packed and very interesting with the barcamp preceding it and the web2open event at the same time. Reinier and myself will attend.

BrightLive (upcoming) Obligatory Dutch technojam event. I hope this year sports an improvement with some less commerce and some more substance but still I will probably go.

LeWeb3 (upcoming) is always controversial but I don’t really know if it’s worth attending.

Chaos Communication Congres (site) always looks like a great event to close off the year.

What do you think about these events, any of them must see or must avoid? If you happen to visit any of these events and we’re there drop by and say hello.

Yesterday we had the FOWA roadtrip drink with Ryan Carson in café de Jaren. It was a nice gettogether for the Amsterdam based crowd.

During the raffle Maarten Lens-FitzGerald won the free ticket to FOWA. He will undoubtedly have a great time at the conference.

It’s great to have visitors in Amsterdam and showing them the Dutch scene. Amsterdam will have a PICNIC just before FOWA which is a strange event in many ways.