My Web 2.0 Expo: Sunday

April 20th, 2007 by Jack Ivers

This is the first in a series of posts which represent my notes, impressions, and in some cases audio, for the sessions I attended at the 2007 Web 2.0 Expo.

I didn’t leave Chicago until 2:50 PM on Sunday, and then United decided to send my suitcase on a later flight … so it was actually a minor miracle that I got to any sessions on Sunday. What I managed to make was the second hour of “Ignite” sessions, which are a series of 5-minute talks presented by about anybody. Slides advance automatically every 15 seconds, so the pace stays brisk. Here’s what I saw:

  • Justin Kan (Justin.tv) – The Justin.tv Launch: How to get a lot of press completely by accident and through no fault of your own. Interesting to get a first-hand perspective of Justin’s 24×7 videocasting-his-life world.
  • Jane McGonigal (Institute for the Future, Avant Game) – Happiness Hacking An interesting concept, hacking one’s happiness. She references several books that might be worth reading.
  • Andre Charland (Nitobi, RobotReplay) – Remote usability for the rest of us. Looks like a very useful and lightweight way to get a looking-over-the-user’s-shoulder perspective on how people use your website. Definitely on my must-try list.
  • Andres Morey (Octopart) – South Pole Hacks. An interesting story: he worked on his Web 2.0 application while at the South Pole. But the two didn’t seem related really …
  • Simon Wardley (Zimki) – Commoditisation and future stuff. He cranked through 70 slides in his 5 minutes, which was impressive. But for the life of me I can’t remember what he talked about …
  • Nik Cubrilovic (Omnidrive, Techcrunch) – An Introduction to WebFS. Moderately interesting, although I am a bit skeptical of Nik’s primary points: that a standard will actually be supported among competitors in the web-storage space, and that a single standard will emerge that unifies both client application and webware storage.
  • Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Flickr) – Casual Privacy. Great session, excellent perspective on the burden of privacy and a very useful suggestion for a lighter-weight, less-burdensome alternative. We’ve actually implemented something quite similar for a client, but Kellan takes the idea a bit further.
  • Colin Bulthaup (Squid Labs, Potenco) – How do you create a power infrastructure in developing countries using human power. Great idea, interesting gizmo.

Next up: My Web 2.0 Expo: Monday (including some audio)