Webware

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.