Last week I attended “The Online Opportunity” at Microsoft’s headquarters here in London. The main attraction was that Steve Ballmer, CEO, was giving a talk about his company’s take on the brave new world of Software as a Service and doing business online in general. Microsoft Startup Zone has a video recording of Ballmer’s and all the other talks.

Ballmer reiterated MS’s “use Suse or be afraid” position on Linux, i.e. that companies should use Novell’s Linux distribution to avoid being sued by Microsoft for patent infringement (Novell is a Microsoft partner).

He also discussed the drawbacks of the “free with ads” business model and noted that Microsoft had never had much luck in monetising Hotmail. He stated that Google was having the same problems even though “they read your mail and we don’t” (a comment that surfaced on Slashdot today).

Although his performance wasn’t as energetic as on some previous occasions, Microsoft’s man in the bridge came across as sensible, pragmatic and knowledgeable.

For more comments on the event, check out the coverage by Simon Willison and Jeremy Keith.

The beauty of launching an application like Walletproof on the web is its cross-platform interoperability. As long as a user has a web browser, he’s set.

In a recent post titled Facebook is the new AOL, Jason Kottke makes an interesting point about Facebook’s development platform and how its “walled garden” approach might represent a negative trend: If every big player on the web offers their own closed proprietary platform for developers to launch their products on, it becomes inefficient and expensive.

It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously … imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.

Erick Schonfeld, editor of the excellent Business 2.0, discusses this in The Race to Become the Next AOL and he links to a story in the Financial Times where one of MySpace’s founders says they’ll probably follow Facebook’s lead and introduce their own development platform.

An example of a more constructive approach is the platform Netvibes launched recently for developing widgets: Netvibes UWA. They emphasise openness and if you write a widget for Netvibes, it will work in iGoogle, the Apple Dashboard and “many more”.

Creating walled gardens like the Facebook development platform may well make sense as a business decision. One thing is certain though, it won’t benefit the consumer.

Before going to the Future of Web Apps conference last week, I’d become aware of some buzz about OpenID on sites such as Tech Crunch, Slashdot and in the blogosphere in general.

Simon Willisson’s talk on FOWA (slides, video) was an eye opener and OpenID seems close to reaching a tipping point.

David Heinemeier Hansson has recently shown interest, Dan Webb posted the Rails based The No Shit Guide to Supporting OpenID in your Applications and East Media Group have made a plugin available.

Following the Rails community’s reaction to this will be interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if OpenID support becomes native to Rails in the near future.

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.

I’ll be attending The Future of Web Apps conference on the 20th and 21st of this month, i.e. tomorrow and the day after.

Speakers who I’m sure will have something interesting to say include Mike Arrington of Techcrunch, the Last.fm guys, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Tariq Krim of Netvibes (who was recently featured in the Economist article Web deux point zéro) and Digg’s Kevin Rose.

If podcasts become available, I’ll link to any talks I find interesting.

Techcrunch reports that Digg.com suffered at least two hours of downtime yesterday. Today, Digg’s response was extremely sluggish and according to my browser (see screenshot on the right), the bottleneck was a server called hitbox.com, which seems to belong to WebSideStory, a company that provides visitor analytics among other services.

I’m currently using Google’s Analytics service to analyze user traffic on various sites, am experimenting with using Photobucket to serve up the images on this blog and rely on Snap.com to give link previews.

More and more blogs and sites are relying on these kind of backend mash-ups. Digg’s problem with their analytics provider highlights the risk of outsourcing too many features of a business critical site to outside parties.

ps. When I was trying to find the Techcrunch post regarding Digg, I was held up by… you guessed it: The Google Analytics server.

Update: In an interview on TalkCrunch, the Digg team gives an obvious explanation to outsourcing their analytics. Because their business model relies on ads, their customers have to get a third party to tell them how much traffic the site actually gets.