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.

A recent entry on the SmugMug blog, Amazon S3: Show me the money, (via Steve Eichert) highlights the advantages of outsourcing IT infrastructure needs to Amazon’s S3 services.

In short, using Amazon’s webservices is saving SmugMug $500,000 a year.

Businessweek covered Amazon’s web service strategy recently in Amazon’s Risky Bet.

According to Businessweek, Wall Street wants Amazon to just continue selling stuff and stop spending money on crazy IT ideas. SmugMug probably disagrees.

Flock, “the social web browser”, got a lot of attention (or hype) when the web 2.0 term was starting to get traction. The most recent release is 0.7.8 so it is still in beta.

I haven’t had a look at Flock until now and my first reaction is very positive. It somehow feels like so much more than a browser. Apart from its super slick branding on every front (although even the Flock team can’t make a myspace page look good) the browser seems to bring “the web as a platform” one step closer.

When a MySql developer was once asked about innovation he answered that it was easy, Oracle’s feature list was MySql’s to-do list. It’s easy to innovate when your catching up.

Opera is no longer the only Oracle of the web experience. Now, Flock and Opera will give the preview of what will be included next in Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Explorer.