If you are planning to make a bid for HeyAmigo, you have less than 24 hours left. The service is described as, "a service that matches advertisers with email newsletters, and vice versa". The auction is worth checking out as founder Ryan Carson has provided a lot of details on how the service works and the revenue model. The Carsonified team blogged the development process for HeyAmigo on their BareNakedApp blog.

From the auction regarding why they are selling, "We are a small team and we don’t have the man-power to have someone work full time as the product manager. Initially, we hoped we could run the app and maintain our current workload but we just got too busy and Amigo fell by the wayside. We still think it’s an amazing idea that, in the right hands, will make someone a lot of money. The idea of pay-per-click advertising in email still hasn’t been done yet and Amigo is a great start in that direction."

As of the time of this post, there have been no bidders so far. The current minimum price is $25,000 on the eBay auction. They are throwing in free shipping!

Also check out Carson’s "14 things I wish I knew before I built a web app" presentation from late 2006 — the tips still apply today.

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Ok, so I am back from the Future of Web Apps conference held last week in San Francisco. It is great to be back on level ground! You can read all of my notes, and some audio files here. This post will summarize what I believe were the big topics of discussion across the presentations as well as outside the summit. I think Ryan, Gillian, Lisa and the whole gang from Carson Systems did a great job pulling everything together. It felt like a family atmosphere rather than just another conference at a big hotel facility. On the main coverage page, I have listed a few things I would like to see added to the next summit which will make the event even stronger. You can also check out my list of others who have coverage of the event.

The buzzwords seemed to remain far away from the summit. Words like "Web 2.0" were barely mentioned. And that's a good thing. The number one theme of the summit was about creating value. It is important that when we create new web apps, we create them with value. And as Ted from Dogster mentioned, it is about the value the customer sees, not the value we believe the app holds.

Many of the speakers talked about the importance of design. Jeff Veen had a good comment in this area, "Use design techniques to improve the data." It is important to always remember the goal. I think design should help us get to the goal, not move us further from it. Designing web applications is a different beast than creating a brochure web site. There seems to also be a lack of good CSS coders. I find that interesting because I enjoy it and would love to do more of it. I guess it comes from my HTMLCenter.com days.

Matt from WordPress talked about how lucky we are today. I think that sentiment could not be echoed enough. Never before has technology finally caught up with our minds. I am working on an Insight post about this that I hope will really explain my thoughts about this topic. I certainly thank my lucky stars that I am no longer a public accountant though the education and experience has certainly helped me.

And lastly, never be afraid to stand up and say, "I screwed up." People will respect you for telling them as soon as possible about the screw up. Sometimes they will even want to help you correct the issue. Waiting until they find out will generally make the person not trust you in the future. And with a new web app, trust is very important.

Ok, so we talked about some of the non-technical topics discussed. Now let's take a peek at the technical topics I thought were of interest.

Microformats

Tantek Çelik from Technorati discussed Microformats. For me, this was the greatest takeaway from the summit. I run HTMLCenter and so I think it is a great fit for us to add content around this topic. I have some experience around Microformats but it was great to hear that they are going to new levels. Clicking on a name gives you a vCard, a date gives you a calendar entry… c'mon this is great stuff!

Backup, backup, backup… and then backup again

Several of the presenters mentioned how they have lost data because of poor backup plans. Since people will rely on your application, backup should be on the top of the list. If I spend an hour on your site uploading pictures and creating a story, you better believe I expect it to be there next week, next month and next year. Oh yea, having a backup system in one location won't cut it.

Measurement

Over 70% of the speakers mentined measurement. As a former auditor, I can't stress enough the importance of a good analytics program. And I mean having a human create analysis that shows the strengths and weaknesses of the application. Not just pulling a top users/top pageviews report from WebTrends. In all of my discussions, companies state how important analytics and measurement is and in the same breath state that they don't do enough in this area.

Listen to your customers

This might seem like it is not technical, but alas, it is. You need to listen to your customers. Do customer service, handle the incoming calls to your support line, run surveys. And whatever they say (in aggregate), do it. At the end of the day, they are your bread and butter. Get out onto the front lines and what you hear will be different than what you see in a chart or a graph. Also, it gives a personal touch which people really enjoy. And create an easy way for people to contact you in the way that works for them.

Other themes:

• Putting the web app where the people are (mobile, handheld, gaming)
• Overfunding in the beginning can lead to problems
• APIs are important and will be even more important in the future

Again, I really enjoyed meeting everyone and learning more about where we are today for web apps. If you would like CenterNetworks to review your web application or attend your conference, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: futureofwebapps-sf06

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Matt Mullenweg from WordPress was the last speaker and being the last is always hard. He seems to be good at presentations and really kept the audience engaged. Here are my notes from his presentation.

Stats on WordPress Downloads

• Version 1.2 – 822/day
• Version 1.5 – 2500/day
• Version 2.0 – 5115/day – 1.1 million total downloads

Some Misc. Matt Comments

• He removed Sourceforge because it took too many clicks to download
• Mmore eyes = better software
• Plugins are vital
• Apis are important, breaking them is worse than never having any at all
• Plugins vs core = no, core needs to be beefy, address 90%, let plugins handle the balance
• Do your own support — helped him to lern that multiblogs were really a need for about page
• What sucks now — should have provided an aggregation for plugins and themes
• If you want to succeed – be a painkiller not a vitamin

WordPress Lessons Learned

• all hosting sux
• no such thing as a 100% sla
• no such thing as redundant networks and power
• make backups constantly
• buy the cheapest hardware possible – IF – you can stay up when it goes down
• make it easy to contact you

What sucks at WordPress.com today

• no feature list
• no tutorials
• no documentation
• copywriting needs to be better 

Akismet – his new product – a spam tool that learns from each reported spam

• created a developer api
• 20+ implementations from ruby to lasso
• scalable business
• social software

What does Matt see for the future for web apps

• global
• personal
• useful
• humble – frame it for you not we

Final thoughts from Matt

• most importantly build for yourself
• working for someone else is dead
• never say can't
• never forget how lucky you are – and dont waste it

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 | WordPress | futureofwebapps-sf06 | Matt Mullenweg

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Jeff Veen from Google spoke to the attendees about how to design better web application interfaces.

His opening comments were that a lack of the “web 2.0″ buzzword mentioned during the summit is a good thing. He also spoke for a few minutes about the fact that booms and busts are a cycle.

His presentation focused on three areas: Visual Design, Interaction Design and Information Architecture.

Visual Design

• Use visual design competency to build trust with users, empowering them to control their data
• Use design techniques to improve the data
• If you do a good job on the visual design, people will give you the benefit of the doubt

Jeff’s definition of information = data thats actionable. Ajax has changed things for interaction design.

Interaction Design – 4 Principles

• Discoverability – making finding stuff easy
• Recoverability  action should be without cost
• Context – a sense of time place and meaning (amazon checkout)
• Feedback – how the system responds -

Information Architecture

• Blending editorial control with participation
• Tagging is now creating an architecture
• It is now bottom up in some cases

Jeff’s presentation can be downloaded here: veen.com/nextgen.pdf

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 | Google | futureofwebappssf06 | futureofwebapps-sf06 | Jeff Veen

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Ryan Carson, owner of Amigo and DropSend and also Summit organizer presented, “14 things I wish I’d known before building a web app”. I found his discussion to be clear and well presented. I am certain he could have spoke for 90-120 minutes about the items he listed. Here are the 14 items he presented:

1. Work with people in the same timezone (otherwise you will always be on the phone all day/night)
2. One user database (otherwise you will be in user hell)
3. One ecommerce system (same as #2)
4. Don’t have your coder do the xhtml/css (then he/she can’t focus on the programming)
5. Obsess about your website copy (whats impt to visitors )
6. Work with a top notch hardware partner
7. Don’t cut corners
8. Measure and measure more
9. You are not done when you launch
10. Tea-spoons  (what he was saying is that after you focus on all the big items, there will still be lots of loose ends)
11. Four tips merged into one - provide logos and details for the press, use a monthly csv for invoices, add an about us page, make contact easy
12. add tons of stuff to your faq and support pages
13. Be nice to your nasty customers
14. Tips from the pros – here Ryan provided some quotes from other speakers at the conference

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 | DropSend | futureofwebappssf06 | futureofwebapps-sf06 | Ryan Carson

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Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and Oder, discussed the pros and cons of selling and funding and how to bring in a third-party to assist with the funding process. Most of his discussion was focused around his screw-ups from the Odeo process. I would have liked him to discuss what are the consequences of making mistakes. Here are some notes, they are limited as most of his discussion did not seem note-worthy.

Evan's Best Screw Ups from Building Odeo

1. Building for people not like ourselves
2. Not adjusting fast enough
3. Raising too much money too early
4. Not listening to my gut

And his best comment,dont talk. type., means that sometimes just sit down and start typing and eventually something will come out of it. Talking all the time without typing gets you nowhere.

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Michael Arrington was the first presenter of the second day. Many people told me that he is very cocky and full of himself so I was expecting the worst. I thought his presentation was quite good and he does not hold back on his opinions which provided good value for the overall presentation. I recorded several of his comments in mp3 files which you can download below including his comments on the “Apple Incident” earlier this week. Oh yea, he also stated he would like to be Digg CEO.

Winners, Losers, and Companies to Watch

Winners: writely, grouper, skype, newroo, flickr, weblogs, myspace, bloglines, userplane, ksolo, blogger, del.icio.us

Very good bets: digg, facebook, youtube, photobucket, zoho, stumbleupon, popsugar, plentyoffish, netvibes

Ones to watch: jobster, riya, zillow, flock, sharpcast, rocketboom, 1-800-FREE411, odesk, secondlife, wordpress

What were they thinking: inform, gather, pubsub, browzar, jigsaw, squidoo

Winners – Shared Attributes

• passion for what thye are doing
• doing something extraordinary – purple cow
• removing serious friction
• great founder dynamics
• never raised big money
• perfect revenue model not required
• and launched with post on tc

Loser Attributes

• poor founder team choices
• lifestyle/ego entrep
• raised too much money/spent too much money
• over business planned
• forogt about scaling

Choosing Your Platform

• php
• ruby
• java
• .net

Client Platform

– net, ajax, flash, xul, adobe apollo (his fave)

Saturated and Unsatured Markets

• social networks
• social bookmarks
• video
• photos
• blogging platforms
• feedreaders

Big Potential for Success in the Near Term

• platforms
• desktop apps
• office efficiency
• cloud storage
• identity
• developer tools
• market destruction – i.e. 1-800-FREE411
• enterprise

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Ted Rheingold from Dogster/Catster discussed passion-centric communities. I thought his presentation really hit on the key points to create success with a PCC. Here are some of the notes from his presentation.

Ted sat down with CenterNetworks for an interview »

What is a passion-centric community?

• Dedicated to a single particular interest
• Usually includes human profile sharing
• Nothing new
• They amplify passion thru enriched community experience

Core Components of Passion Centric Communities

• Entertainment
• Sociality
• Services
• Information

Other Features

• Design must amplify
• Moderation
• Groundrules
• Safety policies
• Wngage how they prefer

Sincerity Cannot be Faked

• Offering features that can be leveraged
• Passions do not fit into buckets
• Monetizing the long tail not for us
• Don’t ignore your community

Looking at Monetization

• Advertising and sponsorships
• Subscription programs
• Selling member-made or site-specific items

Making Advertising Work

• Keep your ad sales inside
• Adveritisers need to have a direct connection to the communities passion
• CPM is almost dead
• Require advertisers to offer something real to the community

Future of Passion Communities

• For every passion there will be a site and could be more than one
• There will be tens of thousands
• Apis and badges bring the communities to where the member is
• Public and open id systgem will be used
• Web is just a launching point – cell phones, etc. — communities will meet where their members are

Sites Ted Likes for Passion-Centric

• deviantart – 2 million members
• amateurillustrator
• cnet community
• fabsugar
• modelmayhem
• mlg
• Yahoo! autos customs
• carspace
• boompa
• feelingbullish
• socialpicks
• mybloglog
• famster
• clubmom
• craftster.org
• vampirefreaks.com
• yourclimbing
• everytrail
• cute overload
• twitter

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Mike Davidson from Newsvine was the last speaker of the afternoon. He was holding us back from making our way to the Google party so he had to be on his game. He was the only presenter who started with a story. I appreciated the ice breaker.

Here are some of his comments:

• With a user generated content site, much of the content that is created is crap
• Myspace does a great job of turning trash into treasure
• del.icio.us is great at extending your memory
• Second life game – talked about the importance of this game but that his machine is not fast enough to run the game
• Social sites must be able to scale to be effective

Some of his reasons why social networking works today but did not work 10 years ago:

• “Always on” factor, even more important than the speed
• Much easier to find and contribute
• Much better publishing tools

What’s Working:

• Letting users do what they please – i.e. comments
• Keep comments on
• Dunbar number – which basically means that you should limit groups to 150
• Top user on Newsvine in August earned $400

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 | Carson Summit | Future Web Apps | futureofwebappssf06 | mike davidson | futureofwebapps-sf06

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Carl Sjogreen from Google Calendar reviewed the Calendar project and the success they have experienced.  He seemed to wonder why so many people signed up right away. Carl, same reason why people will buy a new iPod even if there is nothing different about it from the previous version. Because there is a “cool” factor in being a first-user and also because it comes from a trusted company. Below are my notes on pieces of the discussion I found interesting.

The Road to Google Calendar:

• classic google product team
• 1 project manager and 3 engineers
• origin from both customer feedback and internal interest
• seemed like a space with little innovation – nothing out there was “right”

Talking to Customers is very important for these reasons:

• Talk to real customers
• Spoke to many people, sometimes even in their homes
• Key themes emerged quickly

He feels its important to have a vision.

6 key insights that might be useful for your next product or company:

1. Easy is the most important feature
2. Know your real competition
3. Visual design matters
4. Build products for people who don’t want to use them
5. Timing launch properly — make sure it’s the right time, it is hard to do, only have one shot
6. Driving usage

Lastly he mentioned the, “akl system”. I assume he means the acknowledge system of verification for changes. If anyone can confirm, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 | Carson Summit | Future Web Apps | futureofwebappssf06 | Carl Sjogreen

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Tantek from Technorati discussed Microformats. From speaking to some attendees, they felt like this was the best discussion of the day. Really useful information that can be put to use by everyone in attendance. The basic idea is that Microformats are a way to use HTML to a new level. He showed ways to take basic HTML pages and turn them into vCards and hCalendars with very little work. I suggest downloading the presentation using the link below.

The presentation is available here:

http://tantek.com/presentations/2006/09/microformats-practices/

What are Microformats?

• Microformats enable the publishing and sharing of higher fidelity information on the web
• Building blocks that enable users to own, control, move, and share their data on the web
• Small bits of XHTML that identify richer data types like people and events in your webpages
• The fastest and simplest way to provide an API or your website

More than just "good class names"

• principles keep things micro
• process emphasizes getting real
• community minimizes duplicates

Microformats Principles:

• solve a specific problem
• simple as possible
• Humans first, machines second
• Reuse from widely adopted standards
• Modularity/embeddability
• Decentralized development, content, services

Microformats Creation Process:

• Pick a specific, simple problem and define it
• Research and document current web publishing behavior
• Document existing formats in the problem area

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Dick Hardt opened the session with a discussion of Identity 2.0. The discussion was only 15 minutes. I think he could have used at least 30, maybe an hour. This could have been the most interesting discussion of the day had it been more in-depth. Here are some of my notes:

What is identity? Who are you. The basics is that just like a credit report, past experiences predicts future experiences.

Dick recommends a book — The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

What is digital identity? It is what's behind your usernames.

Dick talks about Microsoft's Info Card product and that it appears cool. He states that Google and Yahoo! basically are one login for multiple sites but that the sites are in silos. And that while Passport by Microsoft has basically failed, the Info Card product holds potential.

eBay's reputation system uses a past predicts future model. He suggests eBay is the best in this area today.

Some of the companies using Identity 2.0:

• Wikipedia
• Slashdot

Final thought from Dick: eBay could use reputation as a central housing point. Other companies could leverage the eBay reputation system and pay to post reputation points.

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Kevin Rose spoke about Digg and its successes. Here are my comments, slightly edited:

Kevin opened by calling his presentation a "preso"… Site has been live since end of 2004. Presents an overview of Digg and how the site works. A new function called "my number 1" was added to the site yesterday which allows you to make your important stories even more important to each user.

Startup background on the Digg site:

• Held interviews for many companies and Slashdot, Del.icio.us and Friendster combined together to come up with the idea for Digg
• $2,000 to start, using a developer on elance for $10/hr.
• Open source architecture
• Basic design
• $99 a month hosting

Talked about the types of design for a web app:

• basic utilitarian design
• cheap crappy design
• and high priced quality design

Initial launch plan:

• 200+ blog readers
• Users with personal passion for technology
• Limited functionality
• Highlight users – diggnation

General comments on "success":

• Spread by word of mouth, no advertising
• Give your developers a chance to play and try out ideas
• Tagging won't work on Digg
• Hire experienced DBAs

Explaining about the "Digg Effect"

• Digg should never take away traffic or cache content, should always push to site creator

Some Digg Stats:

• 500k registered users
• 10million pages a day
• 1 million daily unique views
• 90+ boxes

Future plans:

• Learning from users and then making suggestions to friends and stories
• Digging other types of content online

QA session:

• Will there be an API? Yes, an API is coming, and a digg button on your site is coming
• Whats your take on ads? we always tried to keep the site clean, would like to keep it the same as they have it now and can become profitable with the current amount ads.
• Timeline of the company? started with Kevin and a programmer ($10/hr), $50,000 investment from a partner, hired the programmer full-time, brought in a CEO to gain a round of funding. Today at 15 staff, most in ops and development.
• Can you remove data? we will be rolling out a remove mode in the future.
• Will you be expanding search? Yes, we will be working on a better search soon and moving away from a mysql search. 
• what's your take on paying the top users? we want to keep it as fair and equal as possible. The most popular content comes from all users. We are different than Netscape in the fact that we do not pay our top users.  
• How do you collect user feedback? We collect through e-mail and we have a person dedicated going through all of the feedback we receive.

My comments on the presentation:

Kevin (like most of the other presenters) needs to refine his presentation style, felt like a developer talking to other developers. Would have been nice to open with some interesting fact or story rather than just jumping into the presentation. Felt more like he read us the about us page for most of his presentation.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 | Carson Summit | Future Web Apps | futureofwebappssf06 | Kevin Rose

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Tom Coates from Yahoo! presented about Social Change on the Web. His presentation was great and his presentation style really kept the audience engaged. Here are some notes from his presentation (comments are raw and unedited):

Tom discusses MySpace as a unit, not at the individual pages. Social software is a long line of software and started all the way back with things like alphabet and writing. Doing more together than we could do apart. Social software definition: Using software to enhance our social and collaborative abilities through social mediation.

• An individual contributed should get value from their contribution (individual motives)
• These contributions shold provide value to their peers as well(social value)
• The organization that hosts the service should derive aggregate value and be able to expose this back to the users (business value)

Concensus – many contributions make one voice (wikipedia)
Polyphony – Many voices with emergent order

Wikipedia works because of the process and order they have even though the Concensus model does not work and is not replicable

Polyphony model offers much more ability to succeed. Offers infinite communities. Tom talked about the motives for why people share in a community.

Why do people contribute to open source software?

• learning to code
• gaining reputation
• scratching an itch
• contributing to the commons
• stick it to microsoft

Another way of looking at why people contribute

• Sharing without really knowing it
• Saving for personal use
• Sharing with friends
• Sharing with interest groups
• Self expression and showing off
• Good of the world

Things that don’t work well:

• Be wary of clumsy incentives like money, points and competition

Open up social value:

• expose every axis of data you can
• Give people a place to represent themselves
• Allow them to associate, connect and form relationships with one another
• Help them annotate, rate and comment
• APIs are cool

Problems:

• Be very careful of user expectations around how private or public their contribution is
• Be wary of creating monocultures
• Remember not all your users need to participate to generate social value

Business value – wheres the money

• Attention and advertising
• Premium accounts
• Building services around the data
• Using user-generated annotations and contributions to grow own information

Rise of aggregate data:

• proprietary data sources own a space
• they license their data initially selectively
• increasingly fluid and commoditized services emerge with flat-rate data provisions

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A few hundred people have shown up for breakfast here at the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps. Yahoo! and AOL are here offering up jobs. Kudos to CW for the great breakfast spread.  Met Jack Young and the team from 44360, they seem to have a very talented team.

Our full coverage is located here including pictures:

Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps Conference

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