Best theatrics: Soocial.com

Founder Stefan Fountain made the conference’s most entertaining presentation. His style was relaxed and funny but slightly intense at the same time. His theme was how much trouble he had getting his mom’s phone number into his new mobile phone. His product is going to solve this problem for him and everyone else: “Enough about my mom, let’s talk about your mom.” My own contact list is a fragmented mess and if he solves it elegantly, he’s on to something.

Most informing: Simon Willison

I’ve been meaning to look into what exactly openId is and how it works. Simon saved me the trouble. Very interesting.

Most surprising: Rasmus Lehrdorf

Why should a talk by the creator of a programming language I don’t like interest me? Sure, Rasmus is a hero and PHP is used to run a large chunk of the web, but PHP causes pain while Rails is sweet. Rasmus’s talk turned out to be both entertaining and thought provoking. Why haven’t I heard of Valgrind until now? Note to self: Always show up to talks by superhackers.

There was lots more of juicy stuff in the conference. Digg’s Kevin Rose and Last.fm’s Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa-Cavia had some thought provoking stuff to say and the Last.fm guys presented an interesting hack I might blog more on later.

In short: Good stuff.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 7:34 pm and is filed under FOWALondon07, Technology, The Web as a platform, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.