Notes from Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Conference in London '07

I attended the FOWA conference for this week in London. I enjoyed the conference, and some of the talks were interesting. I'll post my notes from some of them in separate posts here.

The highlight of the conference turned out to be the filming of 'DiggNation', a podcast by the founders of Digg, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. Though most of it was childishness and how should I put it... bullshit, they managed to get the crowd really motivated and engaged. It was a great demonstration of marketing. While all they were doing was marketing their website, they managed to get the peoples' attention off that fact. They got girls proposing to them, which got other girls in the audience engaged. Talking about beer and booze, and cursing a lot, got the guys' attention. And giving free beer before and after, didn't hurt... In all it was a great performance.

From the talks, the common themes of the conference were:

1. Growth is essential, and the new social apps are well set for this. It must be made easy for the users' to invite their friends. Things like importing contacts from address books, sharing items with friends, newsfeeds (as in Facebook and Twitter) go a long way. People want to keep relationships with their friends and this should be made as easy and fun as possible.
   
2. Scaling is an important problem that all startups face once they start growing. Many developers mentioned services like Amazon EC2 and S3, which allow developers to quickly add or subtract servers/machines as the demand grows.
   Many founders/developers also mentioned the use of Memcached to cache objects in memory, and save the database from excess traffic.
3. About communities, most speakers rightly suggested that the startup founders should actively participate in their communities. They should be open and honest with them about the features that they are going to implement, and the decisions that they are taking. Any mistakes should be quickly owned up to and apologized for.
   Instead of hard-and-fast rules, there should be guidelines on how to use the product/community. Different and un-intented uses of the site should be allowed and learnt from.
4. About hiring, there were different opinions from different speakers. Some speakers like Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress encouraged hiring only when there are no red flags, and we are assured of the quality of the new hire. Some on the other hand, enumerated not hiring fast enough, as one of the mistakes they made.

In all it was a good conference, with lots of good speakers. From a point of view of a founder, it was interesting to see how other startups are dealing with the same problems that you are faced with. It also helps one's confidence to see other people who are achieving success, are actually not that different from you...

Update: Slides from some of the presentations are uploaded here - http://www.slideshare.net/group/future-of-web-applications/slideshows