a convenient truth

To be honest, I’d have through the 4-way mains extension was pretty much innovation-proof. I mean, what could you improve?

Well here’s two really smart ones I’ve come across this week: OneClickPower and
PowerSquid.

Very smart. Now, I wonder if they can combine the two…

We went to Carson Workshop’s The Future of Web Apps yesterday. The most surprising thing about it, I think, was the number of people there. I was expecting maybe 40 or 50 people, and instead there were about 1000.

I’m not entirely sure who they were. We were there since we are building Web 2.0 apps and hoped to learn something we could apply immediately (which we did).

I don’t know what everyone else was doing there, but it looked like a lot of developers from service companies, interested buyers from corporates, journalists and so forth.

One complaint from a friend there was that it wasn’t really talking about the future of web apps, but more about the present. That’s probably a valid complaint, although the number of Web 2.0 apps is tiny in the context of the whole Internet.

Here’s how the speakers did:

Joshua Schachter of Delicious

Excellent. Awesome quantities of pragmatism.

Cal Henderson of Flickr

Was also very good, and pleasingly British (unsurprisingly unusual at these things).

Tom Coates, Yahoo, formerly The BBC

Necessarily more waffly and hand-wavey, since he was talking less about specifics. He wants a world where there is some sort of perfect market between a load of data providers supplying everything you could ever want. Forgive me for my sceptisicm that such a thing will emerge all by itself.

Ryan Carson of DropSend

Talked about funding a Web 2.0 App, with his real spending. Very interesting. His attitude was very entrepreneurial.

Steffen Meschkat of Google

Brilliant. Gave a Real Programmer talk on AJAX, with some very insightful comments on DOM, CSS and Javascript. Went completely over the head of 98% of the people there, which is a real shame. It went over the head of most of the web developers too, which I guess was partly his point. Compared to “real” programming (i.e. writing compilers) a lot of this web stuff is very noddy.

I missed the other talks, since we were still in the pub after lunch