LONDON-- Britain's normally gray capital was unusually sunny this week. So were the attitudes of Web developers gathered here for a conference while, across the pond, Wall Street was in full panic mode.
A bright-eyed pack of several hundred aspiring Web visionaries descended upon London's Excel conference center for the semi-annual Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference. Eager developers trawled the show floor's booths for stickers that they promptly stamped onto their (overwhelmingly Apple-manufactured) laptops. One pack of young men strolled around in straw sombreros. Another trio passed some time in between lectures by tossing around a Frisbee with the Yahoo Developers Network logo on it.
There was only off-hand talk about the global economic crisis that was also unfolding, in part, just a few train stops away in London's financial district. But people walking these halls all share a fervent belief in the power of their own ideas: Innovation cannot and will not stop, financial crisis be damned.
"A lot of people have asked (whether) the recession will impact certain things. I think the answer is probably that a major recession will impact everyone in some way, but traditionally I think some of the best companies have been built in down economic times," Facebook founder and entrepreneurial icon Mark Zuckerberg said in his keynote address on Friday evening. "If what you're providing is value to the end users...that lasts."
This wasn't some cloistered retreat of idealists. While FOWA is a small conference compared to bigger confabs like the Web 2.0 Expo or Demo, it pulls in big tech sponsors: AOL, Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace, Adobe, Sun Microsystems, all of whom want to reach FOWA's audience of young Web developers. Last year, the tech world went wild over Web platforms--packages of code released to companies and developers so that they could build their own widgets and applications to run on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Now the industry has seen the platform craze extend to mobile phone software, like the iPhone, and new development platforms for downloadable desktop software, like Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight.
If you looked at the conference's array of sponsor booths, you'd think the tech economy was booming like it was in 2006. AOL was handing out pamphlets about developing on properties like social network Bebo and widget-maker Goowy; Sun Microsystems advertised its "Startup Essentials" program with, somewhat incongruously, a mechanical surfboard. Perhaps the biggest piece of showmanship came from MySpace, which hawked its U.K. developer program with one of London's iconic double-decker buses parked on the show floor, covered in MySpace regalia and playing nightclub-worthy electronica from a set of D.J.-style turntables inside.
That's not to say reality wasn't an uninvited guest to the festivities.
None of the big companies on the FOWA show floor seemed to be looking to actually hire new developer talent. A representative at Microsoft's booth, speaking to me over the din of the Guitar Hero stations that the company had set up, said he doubted anyone was hiring and estimated that the market for developer talent in London had probably dropped by five or six percent. A representative at AOL's booth wasn't sure if the company was hiring or not, but said they were really only there to drum up interest in properties like Goowy and Truveo among the developer community.
Entrepreneur or employee?
But it's unlikely that developers were concerned by the lack of employment opportunities; a job at AOL or Microsoft, or even Google, isn't what today's Web kids want anyway. That's not surprising, considering most of them belong to a digital generation that has been characterized by entrepreneurial self-promotion.
Inspired by people like Zuckerberg and Digg founder Kevin Rose, who also spoke at FOWA, and encouraged by how inexpensive it is to build on the Web these days, they see the recent wave of Web innovation as self-propelled. If you can't found a company because the venture capitalists are getting picky, at least build an iPhone app. Who cares if Adobe's not hiring?
Kevin Rose: "A lot of the advice going out there to start-ups right now is to pare back a little bit and get into a mode that you can survive in."
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)But then, there's that pesky "reality" thing again. Many of the developers, as well as designers and consultants also present at the show, spent the Web 2.0 boom swimming in lucrative freelance contracts, and a few admitted that they're now doing the unthinkable and searching for full-time employment. "From the freelance perspective, things are tough," said Suw Charman-Anderson, a London-based consultant who has been a freelancer for ten years. "If someone offered me a job, I'd have to think seriously about it...It's been a very quiet summer for me, and the (client) interest I'm getting now, I'm getting interest from India. Their economy seems to be a bit more robust."
A few companies with executives at FOWA were interested in hiring developer talent. Those companies tended to be independent but established companies that had either a stable revenue stream or a healthy cushion of venture capital to last through difficult times--and often, they are run by the very same people who subscribe to the idea that innovation can live through, and even thrive in financial disaster.
"Companies are seeing that they really need a Web presence and so many have embranced blogs for that," said David Recordon, head of open platforms at Six Apart. "I don't think that's something that businesses will neccessarily cut if money's becoming tight."
Digg's Rose proudly announced in his address to FOWA's attendees on Thursday morning that his company is hiring new engineering talent. But in an interview with CNET News later that day, Rose said everything is tougher now, from finding investors to easily affording company expenses.
"Start-ups that don't have traction and don't have that kind of hockey-stick-like growth on Alexa or Compete or whatever are going to have a really difficult time raising an additional round of funding," Rose said in the interview. "I think that a lot of the advice going out there to start-ups right now is to pare back a little bit and get into a mode that you can survive in." Frugality has always been crucial to Digg, said Rose, who had worked at several start-ups during the dot-com boom.
Survival of the fittest
Recordon and Rose, in their belief that sound business practices and useful services will survive, sum up the general of the freewheeling, free-thinking world of Web developers, where there's a heavy temptation to put a positive spin on the financial crisis. Their reasoning? Starting a business and making it last is always hard, and when a bull market flush with venture cash makes it easy, that's not a good thing. Many at FOWA argued that even in the best of times, the culture of Web 2.0 development should be a sort of Darwinism, albeit a very happy Darwinism covered in stickers with the logos of Bay Area geek brands like Flickr, Digg, and Laughing Squid.
"Starting a company is hard. Period. Exclamation point," said Michael Galpert, founder of a New York-based image-editing start-up called Aviary, in a talk about how to build a company outside Silicon Valley.
Mark Zuckerberg (right): "Some of the best companies have been built in down economic times."
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)He's right. It's a risky industry. In a city like London or New York, especially, many of these bright young developers and engineers likely turned down then-lucrative jobs in the financial sector in order to pursue the more volatile path of entrepreneurship or freelancing. They are already living lifestyles that many of their peers would deem excruciatingly difficult.
"I don't believe in good work, I believe in excellent work at a start-up company," Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis said in a talk about "entrepreneurial insanity" on Friday. "Start-ups are like the Tour de France or the Olympics, but in any team sport if somebody's not pulling their weight, they pull the whole team down."
Conference host and consultant Simon Wardley reminded the audience at a talk about innovation that this industry is never easy and that uncertainty is a perpetual hallmark. When you come up with a novel idea, it won't be novel for long.
"By the time we have all the information necessary to make a perfect decision, that decision is generally worthless," Wardley said. "Opportunities need to be seized."
And entrepreneur-turned-investor Julie Meyer of Ariadne evoked a quotation from Sir John Templeton that says to "invest at the point of maximum pessimism." Encouraging entrepreneurs to get venture rounds completed and to use the cash wisely, Meyer said, "Entrepreneurs are always investing at the point of maximum pessimism. That's what they know how to do best."
This is where the Darwin effect comes into play, as some entrepreneurs readily compare the current financial crisis to the original dot-com bust in a good way--that it might have a positive effect on the industry by separating quality start-ups and ideas from a long, candy-colored, vowel-free parade of Web 2.0 silliness. Being part of the business had become almost too easy, a fact easily illustrated by the loads of goofy widgets that flooded Facebook's developer platform and soon generated a vocal backlash.
Google engineer Kevin Marks, who helped build the OpenSocial platform, pointed out that the lean years of 2001-2002 brought forth many of the start-ups that have proven to be both innovators and powerful market forces in the past half-decade. "If you look at when the dot-com bubble burst, a lot of the companies that are speaking (at the conference) today grew out of that," Marks said. "What you tend to get in the quieter times is people coming up with these things...Flickr is a great example."
But here's the problem with this crisis-be-damned idealism: it will not always play out as well as every optimistic developer hopes. Many of the ambitious young techies who are convinced that they have the wherewithal to make it through the financial crisis are going to be in for a nasty surprise. That VC pitch spree might come up fruitless. That social-advertising-based business model might not turn a profit.
"There is not and cannot be a simple method (to innovation)," Simon Wardley said in his talk. Nor is steering a company, or even a great idea, through the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.
Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, 'Tough times for tech'
Zuckerberg (right) speaks with FOWA organizer Ryan Carson.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)LONDON--These are tough times for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The economy is in the tank, Madison Avenue still doesn't have full faith in the social network's ability to generate ad revenue, and entertainment-industry analysts estimate that in a few years the 24-year-old CEO could be in danger of losing his title of "world's youngest billionaire" to pop singer Miley Cyrus.
But Zuckerberg lucked out on Friday with his keynote "fireside chat" at the Future of Web Apps conference. Interviewed onstage by conference organizer Ryan Carson, Zuckerberg wasn't subject to any particularly difficult questions (after all, he answered the "profitability" one this week), heckling from the audience a la South by Southwest, or otherwise awkward moments. The point of the talk, really, was just about what it means to be a developer.
"The audience is packed with people who build Web apps," Carson said as he kicked off the talk. "What's it like to grow your company and build a popular Web app?"
Zuckerberg, wearing sneakers and his trademark North Face fleece, said that it was his first trip to London since junior high and talked extensively about Facebook Connect, the data-portability technology that had just been demonstrated onstage by his colleague Dave Morin. "Facebook Connect is basically the next evolution of Facebook Platform, and the thing that I'm most excited about it is that it basically brings into parity what people can do on Facebook.com with the rest of the Web," he said.
But the company is releasing Facebook Connect, which is now in beta, more cautiously than with its platform predecessor, which had a wildfire debut that left the company "floored, in a positive way," Zuckerberg said. "We're having a little bit of a different process in terms of rolling it out because it involves people taking their information offsite. We want to make sure that the privacy and everything else is in order."
It'll launch in full in the "next few months," he said.
He also talked more candidly than usual about the shortcomings of the platform, and how it soon became a hub for goofy viral applications that users quickly started to find annoying. The redesigned look of Facebook pages relegates many of those apps to a separate "boxes" tab, which has irked many developers, but Zuckerberg implied that if apps are seeing a decline in use because of the redesign, they probably aren't the sorts of apps that Facebook envisioned as part of its platform in the first place.
More than anything, he continually stressed, Facebook is about sharing information and content.
"With the new design we're trying to do that with the profile," Zuckerberg explained when talking about sharing. "When we launched (the) platform, a lot of apps just focused on getting a box to be installed on the user's page. The issue with that is the app may never have been used by the user again," he said. Facebook aims to "incentivize" apps that encourage real interaction.
Carson's questions were, for the most part, not particularly challenging for the PR-groomed Zuckerberg. But he did prod the young founder into mentioning the longstanding rumors that Facebook wants to institute a payment system for its users and has been working on it for some time.
"Someone could build that, and there are definitely a lot of platform apps that have business models that are based on payments," he said and then paused.
"There is the rumored Facebook payment system," he added with a bit of cheek. "Who knows when it'll be ready...(There's) definitely nothing to announce yet."
When talking about the central importance of sharing to Facebook, Zuckerberg described how members are now willing to share much more than they were when the site launched four years ago. He compared it to Moore's Law, suggesting that the "exponential" rate of sharing could be charted and predicted when it came to future features that Facebook could add. One of those things could be location-awareness, which Carson asked about and which Zuckerberg implied in his Moore's Law analogy that the alleged exponential curve simply hasn't reached yet.
"There are millions of people who are using Facebook just on mobile devices, and location is a big part of that," was as specific as he would get.
He spoke much more concretely, probably because of the developer-heavy audience, about the "openness" issue. Standards like OpenSocial have been developed in the wake of Facebook's generally closed-off policies with its code and platform, and so far, Facebook has declined to support these or other standards like OpenID. Zuckerberg still would not rule it out.
"I don't know if I'd frame it as a concrete thing we haven't chosen to do; I would maybe say that there's a trend in terms of how things play out and we haven't done it yet," Zuckerberg said. "Openness is clearly a very good thing."
But he had some critical words for Facebook's open-source rivals. "For the developer platforms, in terms of the supposed 'open' stack and then the Facebook one, right now the feedback we get from developers is that people prefer a lot of our interfaces," he said. Eventually, though, he said that Facebook would extend its APIs so that third parties could implement the massive amounts of data on the site in one form or another.
In terms of advice for developers, Zuckerberg declined to really elaborate on what he'd do differently if he were starting the company now, or what mistakes he's acknowledged he's made along the way. But he did say that he prides himself on having a workforce that's largely staffed by people with technical and engineering backgrounds. "A lot of the people (at Facebook), even if they're not in technical roles, they have technical backrounds," Zuckerberg said. He added that the company's chief financial officer is one of them. "I think credibility is external but DNA is internal. I don't know that having a CFO that has a more technical background gives us more credibility, but I think it could help us make better decisions."
Carson asked Zuckerberg what he does to unwind when he goes home.
"I don't go home that often," Zuckerberg replied.
The Run Around, an app created by Facebook to test its Facebook Connect project.
(Credit: Facebook)LONDON--A lot of hands in the audience went up at the Future of Web Apps conference when Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin kicked off his talk at the conference with the question "How many people have built something on Facebook Platform before?"
Fewer went up when Morin then asked the crowd how many had used Facebook Connect, the company's new data-portability initiative. It's live now, he said.
Facebook unveiled Facebook Connect in May amid a flurry of other companies' data-portability announcements, like Google's Friend Connect and MySpace's Data Availability, which has partners like Yahoo and eBay. A few Facebook Connect partners have rolled out already, and others have announced concrete plans--like blog network Gawker Media, which says that commenters will soon be able to use their Facebook log-in credentials.
Though Facebook has a reputation for keeping its user data behind (virtual) closed doors, Morin said that's the opposite of Facebook Connect's aim. "We wanted to take down those walls and make you able to integrate Facebook anywhere on the Web in any way that you want," he said, explaining that Facebook Connect has a trifold aim: transporting your Facebook identity, making your friends lists portable, and seeing detailed activity feeds from what your friends do across the Web.
"If one of your friends did something on the Web, and you don't know about it, did it actually happen?" Morin asked jokingly. But on a more serious note, Facebook Connect could be a formidable threat to social aggregators like FriendFeed if it's deployed widely across the Web. But sites like FriendFeed simply rely on RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Facebook Connect requires active partnerships. That's why Morin's talk was such an important sales pitch for the company: the developer-heavy audience was full of the people whom Morin and his colleagues need to convert.
Demonstrating the integration of Facebook Connect using an internally created sample site called "The Run Around" (it logs workouts) as well as a smattering of examples from partners like Red Bull, Digg, Six Apart, and CBS (which publishes CNET News), Morin emphasized that it's an extremely simple process for developers.
As for privacy, something that has been a big topic for critics of data-portability projects, Morin said Facebook Connect will provide a benefit rather than a drawback. "What we're trying to do here," he said, "is putting the user fully in control. On Facebook, users have a robust set of privacy settings. With Facebook Connect, those privacy settings can transfer directly to your site. We think that's really powerful."
Digg founder Kevin Rose, in a photo taken at the last Future of Web Apps conference in Miami.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)LONDON--In the first part of our interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps conference, CNET News asked the Web start-up poster boy about everything from the company's Series C funding round to whether he's concerned about when those election stories stop rolling in.
In part 2, Rose got a little more specific: What would happen if Digg got hit with a stock-plunging news hoax? Will he be making acquisitions? And most importantly, does "digg" mean anything dirty in any foreign languages?
CNN had that big debacle with a user-submitted story, about Steve Jobs having a heart attack, which turned out to be fabricated. What's your policy for what happens if something gets "dugg" that isn't true and which could have a big impact on stock performance or elsewhere?
Rose: The good news is that we have a lot of people that are actively looking for that and who flag and bury content based on whether or not it's inaccurate. There's probably not a day that goes by that there isn't a piece of content flagged on the site as inaccurate.
Do you employ anyone to keep tabs on that?
Rose: No. This is all done by the masses. We're fortunate enough to have millions of people come to the site every day, and thousands of people vote. (They can say), "this is bad," and we can apply that tag to it. We'll display a little stamp that gives a warning that the community has flagged it as potentially inaccurate. We see that every single day.
If a company serves a takedown notice because something was dugg about them that isn't true, would you comply? In the past you've been very vocal about not interfering with the community.
Rose: We'll only take things down that we receive like DMCA cease-and-desists that come to us. Often it's something like that there's a link to a pirated copy of Photoshop. But normally that sort of thing gets buried on its own because users won't promote piracy directly...We get a few a month but it's never a big deal because it's usually just blatant piracy.
So talk about internationalization. It's coming late next year. As a bit of a hint, are there any countries where Digg is extremely popular and a language translation might make sense?
Rose: Well, London is our largest city overall. But outside of that, as far as different languages are concerned, there is demand from certain users coming in and writing to us, but we see a lot of Digg-type clone sites, and those are the ones that we kind of keep tabs on. So we say, OK, where are our competitors and how are they doing? There's a Spanish version of Digg, there's a German version of Digg that's called Yigg or something like that.
And they're unofficial, or do they use your API or anything like that?
Rose: They're unofficial. They do their own thing. And then there's also a Digg in Japan that has some traction as well. So we look at this stuff and we say, OK, what do we do? Do we open up a version of Digg out there? Do we acquire these companies? It's all stuff that we talk about and I think that where you'll see this expand first is a combination of both requests from users and where our competitors are starting to take off.
So you might acquire a smaller competitor?
Rose: Sure, potentially.
Would you look at all into "crowd-sourced" language translations that we're seeing on sites like Facebook and Hi5?
Rose: The translation, we don't have a ton of things that would need to be translated. It's not like we would be translating the U.S. submissions. It would be their own submissions and a whole separate engine running an instance of Digg outside of our own, but still connected so that you could go to the U.S. version of Digg and it would show up in your profile and everything. But yeah, I don't think we're that far along. Right now we're just looking at different areas and where we want to expand and the code that will be needed to make that happen. It's all stuff that we'll be doing over the next couple of months.
Do you have any offices outside of San Francisco now?
Rose: We have a small group of people. We have someone that's working for us in Scotland and also someone that's working for us in Amsterdam. No official Digg logo on the side of a building anywhere.
So do you have any plans to open more offices?
Rose: I'm sure, eventually.
When you expand internationally, you're not going to have to change the name of the site or anything? It doesn't mean anything offensive in any language?
Rose: Somebody told me it did in one language. I can't remember what it was.
Your talk today was about the future of news. How do you see yourself in the news industry as a whole, beyond the niche of social news?
Rose: I don't know that we do actually. I think we're just kind of that platform to level the playing field. We will never become a news publisher in any way, in that we won't produce our own content or host other peoples' articles. We'll always be kind of directing the flow of traffic.
When you expand into other countries and if you launch localized versions, are you planning to have to deal with governments that may not agree with Digg's views on freedom of information?
Rose: Absolutely. I think that we have always wanted to create a neutral, level playing field, and I would not be OK with changing that point of view when it comes to Digg. I'm not going to bend our rules when it comes to story promotion or our algorithms that look for a unique, diverse crowd of people thinking that something is interesting, and wouldn't allow anyone, any government to manipulate that. That might mean that we can't actively compete in some markets, but those are kind of our core principles, and those will never be compromised.
You were talking a lot about how you've got a ton of data that you haven't sourced out yet. Have you thought at all about adding an additional revenue stream by licensing analytics to clients?
Rose: Yeah, one of the big things that our business development team spends a lot of time working on is relationships with publishers. They're constantly coming to us and saying that (we) have a lot of data about their users--what they do, what they enjoy, where they're coming from, what other articles and other sites they're posting on--and it would be cool if we could get some of that data into a type of dashboard.
That's all things that we're looking at as far as tools for publishers, like some of the other things I mentioned today like a recommendation engine for publishers. It's definitely on the road map and it's stuff we want to develop, but it's just important that I'm not going to build a custom suite for CNN and not provide it to a blogger. I just want to make sure that when we do build a tool, it's available to everyone.
At this conference, there are a ton of young independent developers eager to learn. Given this financial climate, things are tougher when it comes to getting venture funding or getting a job. What would your advice to them be?
Rose: E-mail us at jobs dot digg dot com. (Laughs.) You're absolutely right in that I've talked to a lot of investors recently, some of our angels, a couple of VCs, that I know and communicate with, and it's definitely a weird time right now. Start-ups that don't have traction and don't have that kind of hockey-stick-like growth on Alexa or Compete or whatever are going to have a really difficult time raising an additional round of funding. I think that a lot of the advice going out there to start-ups right now is to pare back a little bit and get into a mode that you can survive in.
There's a way to, they call it, "raise an internal round" of funding just by cutting back on things that you don't absolutely need. Cut that out of the budget and it's like raising money because you're not spending it. I really unfortunately think that there's going to be a lot of start-ups that go by the wayside in the next 12 months. The advice I hear out there is that if you can raise money, now's the time to do it and then just put your head down for the next couple years. I know a lot of start-ups are trying to do that.
LONDON--On Thursday afternoon at the Future of Web Apps conference, I had to make a choice: Was I going to blog about a talk hosted by Six Apart engineer David Recordon, talking about the "open social Web," or a talk by Ben Huh, the "Chief Cheezburger" of goofy "lolcat" meme site ICanHasCheezburger.com?
Recordon's talk would invariably be an insightful look into issues like OpenID and OpenSocial, which have faded from the headlines in recent months but are still a hot topic in the developer community. But the talk could prove to be code-heavy given the fact that the average FOWA attendee is a seasoned developer. As for Huh, listening to someone talk about pictures of cats would seem a little bit silly given the broader issues we're all facing. But as conference organizers reminded the FOWA attendees earlier in the day, Huh has actually built a successful business with his network of geeky entertainment sites.
So I opted for the cheezburgers. We could all use some levity these days.
Indeed, Huh, who has admitted that he is allergic to cats, provided a shortened version of the wacky story about how he arrived at the helm of I Can Has Cheezburger--because he was sick of his job, was telling a friend via instant message that he loved I Can Has Cheezburger, and the friend in question said, "So why don't you buy it?" He then convinced investors early last year to give him the money to buy the site from creators Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami.
"That investment pitch sounds like nothing you've ever heard before," he said, but later said that the company has been "profitable since day one." They pull in 4 million page views per day, totaled 105 million views in the month of September, and make up a full 10 percent of blog host WordPress.com's traffic.
Huh's role at I Can Has Cheezburger, he explained, is running it like a smart and efficient business, which he says has allowed it to stay on top of things and not bleed through cash. His philosophy, rooted in the core principles of simplicity and obviousness, stands in pretty stark contrast to Web 2.0 outlets that have been all about APIs, platform strategies, widgets, Ajax, and what-have-you. Content syndication? Huh's idea of that is sticking a small I Can Has Cheezburger logo on all images uploaded to the site, providing an HTML embed code, and letting visitors do whatever they want with them.
Most important, he said, was building up community features to keep people coming back. Instead of catering to a small pack of rabid and hardcore users, he suggested working on the second and third tiers because they're much bigger. "Focus on the casual base, which is a really large percentage of users, who maybe visit once a week, once a month," he suggested to the developers in the audience. "You want to convert them so that they become fans. They grow your community."
He had a few more helpful hints: it's a worthwhile investment to buy the misspelled versions of your Web site name (you'd be amazed at how many people can't spell), but it's not a worthwhile investment to offer to pay contributors (the infrastructure is hell). Don't waste money building something in-house if it already exists for your use--i.e. commenting systems. Instead of paying for a slick design, pay to keep those servers up and running.
Above all, Huh told the FOWA audience to keep things simple, citing the "experiential difference" of Google beating Yahoo initially by just putting a search box on a mostly-blank page. "Technology people have a tendency to make simple problems incredibly complicated," he said--and that includes goals. I Can Has Cheezburger's goal is that "we want you to be happy for 5 minutes every day," he said. "That's a pretty low bar."
And I Can Has Cheezburger sister site FailBlog, he said, is really catching on in the face of financial turmoil.
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