Steff.me

So, even though it’s old news by now, I figured I may as well give some form of opinion of FOWA 2008. Last year was the first time I had attended this event and, it has to be said, this year was better by far. I was going to do a larger talk-by-talk post, but I’ve decided against it because I’m not even interested in what I thought of them. Instead, I’m going to discuss the thing as a whole, with some specific things that stood out.

There are two “tracks”, Business and Development, that divide the conference. These tracks have talks going on simultaneously, so you have to pick your role and go with it (yeah, of course you can jump over to the other side whenever you want). Being more into the development side of things, the majority of the talks that I went to were in that track. The problem with the Development track is that the talks aren’t “techy” enough. A lot of them are vague overviews of how a particular company operates, with their spin on things. For example, Kevin Rose did a talk on the future of news. Instead of providing a concept for the future of news and how things could be, he gave a very digg-centric speech (who’d have thunk it?) on the digg recommendation engine mixed in with other digg stuff. I’m fine with him saying “use digg” or “digg rocks”, but I’d like it even more if he gave more of an in-depth analysis of the proposed features. Another example the guy from 280 North, who gave a lovely presentation, had some nice ideas but all-in-all was just one big sales pitch for “use Cappuccino and 280 Slides!!!”.

I think that that is the main problem with FOWA. The sales pitch. Maybe this is the wrong conference for me, but what I want is somewhere for tech or business minded people gathering to discuss and debate the future of web, with specifics in web applications. In FOWA, all of the talks are basically a sales pitch for that company. There are exceptions, don’t get me wrong, but in a lot of the talks its just one big advertisement.

Before anyone cries, “Yeah, but if person X wasn’t working for company Y then they wouldn’t be giving a speech and no one would know of them and no one would care what they have to say, plus I want to know about their company and so on and so forth and I really need to take a breath now…”, I’d like to say that this is what I mean by not “techy” enough. I’m fine with a company talking about their company, I just want to be given code and examples and general theory and not a “use our website, because we are great”.

I understand that people can’t give out their exact code because they are afraid of people stealing it, but a more in-depth look at things would be better than a sales pitch.

Some summarized points that I found interesting:

• When giving a demo, show the app and don’t just talk about it. No one gives a crap about your thoughts on anything other than the app, so don’t offer your opinion.
• Let people steal your content.
• Designer vs. Developer; don’t be just one.

Carsonified, the hosts of FOWA, were great enough film all of the presentations and put them online. The presentations below were my favourite from the entire event. They each offered insight, weren’t overly sales-pitchy and were just incredibly interesting to listen to.

Ben Huh
How to take your community to the next level

Jason Calacanis, Tom Nixon
Work/Life Balance and Blood Sweat and Tears

Jeremy Baines
How to build a desktop app from your web app.

Hypocrite note: This talk was a big sales pitch, but I still enjoyed it as I want to build a desktop app for one of my web apps and this inspired me to get working.

Blaine Cook & Joe Stump
Languages Don’t Scale (full version not released yet)

Kathy Sierra
How to grow and nurture your community.

You can check out the other presentations over at http://events.carsonified.com/, which is well worth doing, if you haven’t already.

And now some obligatory photos from the event:

Microsoft Surface

Myself with Ron Richards

Live Diggnation

Myself with Marcus from iusethis.com (This guy rocks)

I think what makes FOWA is the people and not the presentations. It is a social event, and you can get out of it what you put in. Carsonified tried to nurture this by giving out badges so people could write what they are looking for, what they are in to or pretty much anything to get a conversation going. It’s a mix of people — designers, developers, business-types — coming together over one thing, that make this a great event to attend.