last.fm at fowa
Flickr phonecam shot from govan depicting me fumbling with a presentation remote
First of all thanks to everyone who gave their support at the Future Of Web Apps conference in London last week. I had an amazing time and met many awesome people - absorbed lots of energy and enthusiasm and gained some interesting insights. Thanks again to Carson Systems for having us on stage and even letting us drag our last.fm sound-system over to the conference to stream FOWA group radio in the foyer of the Kensington Conference Hall...
Matt & I spoke on the first day, on the topic of 'Lessons from the Building of the World's Largest Social Music Platform'. Corante has written up some notes, and someone even posted a great mindmap of the talk.
2 slides I particularly enjoyed presenting:
- Demonstrating osmotic communication through our internal wonderbot, irccat. In response to one of the questions on the day, our CTO RJ has open-sourced our implementation of irccat so you can start playing with it. To clarify - we use irc as our internal comms channel, and all aspects of our company absorb information through it.
- Attention as filtering tool for user-generated content, in the context of tag cloud moderation. The talented heiress Ms. Hilton was used as an example.
Other bits and pieces - I referenced this Fred Wilson blog post on the future of media with respect to the monetization of attention data. Also someone in the audience brought up the principles of the AttentionTrust, set up by Ed Batista and Seth Goldstein. If attention data is going to be critical to your web app (and I would argue that it should), then I encourage you to read Seth's entire blog archive on the subject of attention. I know I pretty much have.
My personal highlight was hearing Bradley talk on Flickr interestingness and Yahoo! Pipes (which caused quite a stir in the last.fm office last week). I was particularly bummed out about missing Simon's openID presentation on the second day, as it was ace by all accounts.
A podcast of our presentation will be up soon, but in the meantime download the slides - 'Lessons from the Building of the World's Largest Social Music Platform' (pdf)
