Webware

MIAMI--Virgin used Alex Hunter's presentation at the Future of Web Apps to announce its new Virgin.com website, due to enter closed beta in the next six weeks. The new site will include a lot of social features that allow users to upload and interact with content published to various sections of the site. Sample sections include entrepreneurship and entertainment.

In addition to the new social features, Virgin is implementing an incentive system on the site to encourage users to upload and interact. Points earned through this system will go not only towards a user's rank on the site, but can also be put towards physical goods since, as Hunter said, "Everyone likes free shit."

Virgin also announced that they have reached agreements with a few personalities to produce content for the site. Those announced include WineLibrary's Gary Vaynerchuk (who is speaking at FOWA later today), Virgin's own Richard Branson, and FOWA organizer, Ryan Carson.

Alex Hunter of Virgin, on stage at FOWA

(Credit: seanosh)

Another interesting tidbit that was revealed towards the end of Hunter's presentation is that Virgin is working on a Facebook Connect implementation for their planes. So, in theory, your friends on Facebook could see that you are sitting in seat 5D, watching Diggnation, and drinking a Coke. There are, of course, a lot of interesting possibilities with this. The system could potentially show passengers if any of their friends are also on board so that they could send them a drink or go say hi.

Virgin has, historically, been on the cutting edge of adopting technology and it's great to see that they are taking some steps forward with social media as well.

Jason Fried, on stage at FOWA Miami.

(Credit: Judson Collier)

MIAMI--Jason Fried of 37signals kicked off the Future of Web Apps conference here with a bang earlier Tuesday.

37signals is known for making project management and collaboration software for the Web. It also features a pricing model for its products, which is somewhat unique for a provider of Web applications.

Jason told the crowd here today that "free is not the future of business." He stressed to the Web app developers and entrepreneurs in attendance that they need to start charging for their applications and that free is not the way to go.

Fried went on to say that it is rare that a company can sustain itself on a free-based strategy and that a pay-based competitor will be able to outlast them.

Especially in these tougher economic times, companies need to make money. Charging for applications is a great way to do it. That's not to say that charging is for everyone, but when applicable, people will pay for a high-quality product like 37signals' Basecamp.

Fried also discussed releasing the byproducts of one's work, as his company has done with Ruby on Rails, which came about as a result of the development of Basecamp.

What do you think? Is free the "future of failure," as Fried suggests, or is it here to stay?

AOL's Edwin Aoki

(Credit: ZDNet UK)

Edwin Aoki is a technology fellow at AOL, and an alumnus of Apple and of Netscape, where he worked on enterprise products as well as the Communicator browser.

On Thursday, Aoki spoke at the Future Of Web Apps conference in London, alongside figures such as Digg's Kevin Rose and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. He urged developers to create applications out of passion and for the community, rather than just doing it for money.

ZDNet.co.uk spoke to Aoki just after his speech, to talk about the impact Web applications have had in the enterprise and what trends are emerging.

In the speech you just gave, you suggested that developers should develop applications out of passion, rather than for money. Is this not an idea that is more applicable to the consumer, rather than the enterprise, developer community?

Aoki: Folks have been able to take whatever their passion or their expertise is and apply the technology to writing that, or to disseminating that, through whatever organization their interest is in. We see that a lot in nonprofits, but we also see that a lot in the enterprise.

Wikis are a great example of a technology that often comes in because some folks inside the enterprise want a more efficient way of spreading knowledge and information, and all of a sudden it becomes this great corporate resource. Messaging is another example of something that, we found at our AIM network, often starts with people wanting to have a better way to communicate inside the enterprise. They bring that in, and all of a sudden they find it's a way they can communicate not only inside the intranet, but also with customers and suppliers as well.

I think it is one of these things where the ubiquity and the low cost and the ease of deployment of these technologies really is the supreme environment where you can bring that into an enterprise, just as you can bring that to consumers or even a non-profit.

Those are examples where a trend started in the consumer sector and moved into the enterprise. Is that going to continue?

Aoki: I think that enterprise software is a slightly different beast. I used to do some of that in my time at Netscape and typically they have fairly long sales cycles, they're centrally administered, they are deployed by an enterprise IT department on behalf of a company, and a lot of those folks are starting to embrace those technologies and bring that in on a corporate level as well.

But I think the rapidity of adoption really does start with individuals. It may start from a consumer focus, and it may start from more of a professional focus, but the common thread is that it does tend to start with a person or a small team or a department that is really interested in deploying that technology.

How much do you think the global financial crisis is going to hit the developer community?

Aoki: We're already starting to see, in some sense, the capital markets and some of the venture funding start to be more cautious. Certainly in (Silicon) Valley, there is still an outgrowth of the lessons learned during the first dot-com bust. People are being a lot more cautious. They're scrutinizing the balance sheet a little bit more; they're looking more for those revenue ideas.

At the same time, a lot of the things I was talking about are fueled really not out of money, and they don't cost that much money to start. Both within AOL and with a number of the folks here at the conference, they just start something on a weekend. And they say well, they'd love to just try out how that works. And they find that it's an idea that catches on, and it's an idea that resonates with people, and all of a sudden they're writing something that is larger than they imagined it would be.

We had products that were launched that way in AOL, from the initiative of an individual engineer. We've had enterprise initiatives that have launched that way, because somebody said there's got to be a better way to...whatever.

Such as?

Aoki: Well, I mentioned wikis earlier. Our internal wiki was started by one of our engineers as a way to incorporate a more decentralized approach to documenting the kinds of things that we do. It's been completely embraced by the organization--hundreds of thousands of pages--and it's now an IT-supported function. We have an internal search agent that goes through our intranet that helps aggregate and organize all the information from our myriad sites--that was an employee-started function.

A lot of these things start off as an idea and all of a sudden the organization realizes, hey, this is really helping, this is a great productivity boost. How can we bring this in, how can we help manage that, how can we incorporate it into our corporate systems and bring that into our security and enterprise policies in a way that's not going to stifle that innovation, but in a way that's going to help it grow and help nurture that.

A lot of organizations have been very cool on social-networking sites such as Facebook. How will social networking win over the enterprise crowd, given that many such sites don't yet have the perceived longevity of instant-messaging applications?

Aoki: Social networking--whether it's Facebook or LinkedIn or any specific instance of it--the notion of the social network is going to stick around. You mentioned instant messaging and, if you reduce that back to its bare bones, you have a social graph, that's just graphed through that buddy list there. And that morphed into the Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world, where you're able to check that and see that a little more transparently. That will morph into something else again, I'm sure, as our understanding of those technologies matures.

So it's there. It's something that's part of that. IBM did a study, again looking at wikis in particular, in terms of the number of people that contribute to a wiki and the number of people that are really involved in that. You can trace domain knowledge through that, by looking at who it is contributing to an area, who the comments are coming from, where the edits are going. Wikipedia has a similar phenomenon on the global consumer web.

But again, that also forms a sort of social network, because you're able to understand who your domain experts are in a particular area. If you feed that out onto a graph, you have some additional metadata on your organization there.

So I do think that those kinds of things will evolve organically out of the way technology is used, and frankly I don't think that we know how that will manifest.

A number of organizations have tried to have these social networks on the intranet, creating internal social networks. I don't know that that works unless you have a very large organization, because the value of a social network is in being able to tease out some of these relationships that aren't necessarily obvious. If you have 25 people and know what everybody does and what their skills are, a social network isn't going to layer a whole lot more on top of that.

But for larger enterprises or geographically distributed enterprises, they can have a lot of opportunities where that network is able to expose information that's not necessarily obvious. And I think that IT organizations will realize that and understand that there's value there.

Perhaps one reason instant messaging became more acceptable in organizations was that the networks became interoperable. But this is still not the case with social networking. How important do you think interoperability and the portability of personal data between sites will be? We haven't yet seen the fruits of initiatives such as OpenSocial, for instance.

Aoki: Not yet, but these things take time. There's been a number of folks who have been working very hard on data-portability standards and protocols. Obviously there's that balance between what you want to expose and (conceal), and there are privacy concerns about that, making sure that we have iron-clad authentication and authorization that goes with that.

We talk a lot about data portability and its need, and it's clearly an important aspect for the industry, but it's easy to overlook how deep that rabbit-hole goes sometimes. In order to have good data portability, you need to have strong authorization. In order to have that, you need to have a strong notion of authentication, and in order to have strong authentication, you need to have identity management that everybody agrees on. These are frankly initiatives that people have been working on for the best part of the last decade.

I think that it will come--it's really important--but really what we're starting to see is the depth of how much there is to solve.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, 'Tough times for tech'

MIAMI--The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you'd think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It's antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it.

Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank." Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses--URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.

Marks wasn't the only one expounding upon e-mail's suckiness. Earlier in the day, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg inferred that overwhelming volumes of spam were making Web users explore options other than e-mail.

And when a lively group of Web 2.0 elite (including Mullenweg, Digg's Kevin Rose, Pownce's Leah Culver, and Flickr's Cal Henderson) tackled a panel led by TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld that involved creating the concept for a new Web app in 45 minutes, their end result was a product that would make e-mail less of a headache by making sure that users reply to everything. (It was done in 45 minutes, so the specifics weren't totally ironed out.)

To top it all off, when I had a meeting with Marks on Friday morning, we used Twitter direct messaging rather than e-mail to confirm the time and location.

That was before Twitter suffered a downage when the start-up's architect, Blaine Cook, was giving a talk later in the day at FOWA and his phone kept ringing with calls from the site's server administrators. Twitter's unreliability is well-known, and certainly calls into question the fact that all these messaging start-ups and social-networking features that are supposedly killing e-mail still might not be stable enough to overhaul the way we communicate.

The recent high-profile e-mail provider crashes, however, provide a counterpoint.

This post was updated at 4:49 PM PT with a clarification from Matt Mullenweg.

MIAMI--"I'm Matt Mullenweg, and I'm famous for eating 108 Chicken McNuggets and surviving," the eccentric 24-year-old WordPress founder said in his talk at the Future of Web Apps conference, explaining that he's no longer continually the No. 1 "Matt" in a Google search because the dancing viral-video star "Where The Hell Is Matt?" gives him a run for his money.

At FOWA, Mullenweg was slated to talk about both the physical and psychological "architecture" of WordPress, which has gained both positive buzz and popularity for being simply constructed, easy to use, and remarkably efficient.

"Scale is what separates us from the other industries of the world," he explained, saying that it's only in the technology business that a tiny entrepreneurial team can create something used by millions of people. WordPress, Mullenweg said, powers 2,523,000 blogs, gets 135 million global unique visitors, and has only 19 full-time employees.

Matt Mullenweg

(Credit: Wordpress)

"All these old-media companies are adding blogs like it's going out of style," he said, talking about how WordPress now powers blogs for The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News ("unfortunately," he added on that last one).

Mullenweg added later in a conversation that he didn't intend "unfortunately" to sound the way it did and that he meant no offense to WordPress' major media clients.

He had quite a bit of advice for the audience. "Be the person in the support forums who's answering everybody's questions," Mullenweg advised start-up entrepreneurs in the room. If you don't look like you're hard-core about your company and its users, he said, you won't build up a following.

It was a pretty geek speak-intensive talk, with Mullenweg explaining to the developer-filled concert hall how WordPress handles server and bandwidth demands, and how to take advantage of systems like Memcached, which was originally developed for social-media pioneer LiveJournal. But he also expounded a bit on the Web 2.0 landscape and some of the issues it faces--like spam, the ugly side of the open-social Web. WordPress has deleted more than 800,000 "splogs," or spam blogs, for example.

Spammers are "the terrorists of Web 2.0," Mullenweg said. "They come into our communities and take advantage of our openness." He suggested that people may have moved away from e-mail and toward messaging systems like Facebook messaging and Twitter to get away from spam. But with all those "zombie bites" showing up in his Facebook in-box, he explained, the spammers are pouncing on openness once again.

He also has a pretty nontraditional view of ad revenues, the supposed cash coffer of new-media sites. "Most of you have never, and will never, seen an ad on WordPress.com," Mullenweg said, referring to WordPress.org's free blog-hosting arm. "We decided to show ads only on certain pages, only to the people who were sort of random drive-by visitors...if you use Firefox, you'll never see an ad, no matter what, mostly because I like Firefox."

MIAMI--The Knight Concert Hall in Miami's Carnival Center complex was filled with a whole lot of Mac laptops on Friday morning for a day of panels and lectures at the Future of Web Apps conference.

Ryan Carson, co-founder of conference organizer Carsonified, had selected freelance Web consultants Brian Oberkirch and Tantek Celik to "emcee" the event and give the audience an idea of what the day's major themes would be.

So what is the future of Web apps? There are a few concrete trends, Oberkirch and Celik told the audience.

First, they said, there's simplicity--the sort of thing evidenced in wildly popular start-ups like WordPress, which has one-upped bigger rivals by being easy to use and adaptable, and geek favorite Twitter, which famously does only one thing (lets members broadcast messages of 140 characters or fewer).

It's often evidenced in the fact that many of the most talked-about Web products these days got their start as side projects. Twitter, Flickr, and even Facebook, with its origins in a Harvard dorm room, had remarkably casual beginnings.

There's also speed. Celik and Oberkirch pointed to Pownce, whose co-founder Leah Culver is speaking at the conference later, and how quickly it's been rolling out new features in an interactive manner rather than launching periodic major updates.

Another important pillar of the future of Web apps community collaboration, they said, is facilitated by the rise of social-media tools to make group work a whole lot easier and allow collaborators to get more done. Celik and Oberkirch called Google's OpenSocial project "a great example of little guys and big guys working together." It's also become much more possible to organize real-life events with the help of wikis and social networks; on Thursday, FOWA was preceded by a Miami iteration of the BarCamp "unconferences," which are famously organized by the attendees.

Then there's happiness--yes, happiness. Celik and Oberkirch mentioned one of the day's featured speakers, Google engineer Kevin Marks, and an idea he asserted on his blog that a "pleasure plan" is just as important to new start-ups as a business plan. OK, that sounds a bit dotcom-hippie for me; we'll see how that fares in a less bubbly economic climate.

And then there's the hottest trend of the future of Web apps: openness. These days it's hard to keep all the "open standards" projects straight: Open Authorization, OpenSocial, OpenID, DataPortability, and the like.

"Openness is the buzzword right now," Celik said. "It's kind of the new black."

"We're in Miami, so I guess it's the new pink?" Oberkirch suggested.

MIAMI--If you believe the blog rumors, Digg founder Kevin Rose is constantly dealing with a community that threatens mutiny at the drop of a hat, perpetual acquisition offers from companies such as Google and News Corp., and the aftermath of that thumbs-up BusinessWeek cover that made him one of Web 2.0's most recognizable shaggy-haired poster boys. Oh, and then there's this Yahoo Buzz thing that's getting a whole lot of press.

So here at the Future of Web Apps conference, I sat down with Rose to clear the air. He's participating in a panel on Friday called "How to Build a Web App in 45 Minutes," and he said we ought to get excited.

"It's going to be awesome. It's probably going to be the best panel of all time," he said with a mildly diabolical grin. "I've got so many ideas for Web apps. I'm going to freaking rock this panel."

Digg founder Kevin Rose.

(Credit: Digg)

Kevin Rose is, after all, known as an idea guy. Not only did he found Digg, but he also created a video production company, Revision3, and a microblogging tool, Pownce. But, he says, Digg is his main focus by far. He's especially psyched about forthcoming developments to the site that will offer personalized recommendations based on a user's past activity, suggesting to them not only news but also other Diggers who share similar interests. (Does this mean that people will start using Digg as a dating site?)

Working with Digg's notoriously vocal community has been quite a trip too.

"It's been a really fun learning experience," Rose said. "Six months ago, I wouldn't have called it fun because I really just couldn't figure out how to best work with the community."

Eventually, he explained, he and the rest of Digg's team asked the community for specific, structured feedback on what they wanted to see on Digg, and that's when the experience changed. Rather than getting demands, they were getting answers.

"Once we did that, rather than the community saying, 'You suck, Digg--fix your comments,' it was a lot more structured," Rose said. "We got a lot more valuable input from the community."

He's not concerned about emerging competitors, either, because he says none of them have particularly impressed him. "I've Buzzed a few stories," he said in reference to Yahoo's new social-news endeavor, Yahoo Buzz. "I think that a lot of people like the idea of potentially getting their articles in front of a lot of people on Yahoo's Web site, and that's a huge carrot to hold in front of people, but functionality-wise, it's really lacking on the community side."

Rose also told me he doesn't want Digg to cash out with an acquisition anytime soon. "I've had several friends that have been acquired by the Yahoos and Googles of the world," he said, "and while there is some upside in certain things, for the most part, it slows things down. You can't get a product out the door fast enough." Hear that, Rupert Murdoch?

Here's part one and here's part two of the full Kevin Rose interview.

MIAMI--The Future of Web Apps conference here hasn't even started yet, but I'm already sensing a major theme of the weekend: social media really is a whole lot bigger than Silicon Valley.

I was sitting in the lobby of my hotel, writing a couple of blog posts because there's no in-room Wi-Fi (gotta make some sacrifices when choosing hotels in a luxury-saturated city like Miami) when a handful of 20- and 30-something guys with laptops came in and set up shop. Another, who'd been sitting across the room, came over and asked us if we were in town for FOWA and the accompanying BarCamp Miami. As it turns out, we all were.

I spent a few minutes talking to one of them, a Honduras-based Web consultant named Alejandro Corpeno who had recently launched a side project called TuBabel. It's a community site that they eventually hope will be a comprehensive, user-driven resource to deciphering the many significant discrepancies between dialects of Spanish spoken throughout the world. From what Corpeno told me, those language differences are significant enough to warrant their own Web site, and said that he eventually hopes TuBabel will be a sort of Latin American UrbanDictionary.

TuBabel is a piece of social media that's very foreign to me, culturally. The site is all in Spanish, of which my knowledge is limited to "la cerveza mas fina," and it deals with a phenomenon that U.S. English speakers don't encounter in their own language (differences in our regional slang are an order of magnitude less noticeable). But I could still get a grasp of its function and purpose because of that social media site structure with which we're all familiar by now: There are tag clouds. There's a staff blog. There are member profiles for networking (the site refers to its users as "Babelistas.") And (of course!) there's a bright, color-gradient-happy design.

I come across social-media sites created outside the U.S. all the time. But it's much less often that I get to talk to the founder of a site that was created internationally, in a language other than English, with a target audience with practically no overlap to the SoMa or SoHo sets--and yet browsing the site still feels intuitive. Imagine: Social media actually might be that great international unifier that all those wacky Web futurists say it is. (Well, let's be real. It's not going to stop global warming on its own.)

I probably shouldn't find this quite as remarkable as I did, and have made a note to myself to get my head out of the sand. While at FOWA, I'll be keeping an eye on cool trends and new players in the international social media and start-up markets that you probably won't read about on the English-language industry blogs.

But Web 2.0 isn't the only common denominator at this conference. One of the hotel's staff members noticed the pack of FOWA attendees in the lobby, all with PowerBooks or MacBooks of one variety or another, and commented, "Is there an Apple convention in town?"

"Yeah, basically," one of the FOWA-bound guys said.