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• Web 2.0: The “No Expo” Expo Posted Tuesday, October 5, 2010 Reneldy Senat 0 Comments

  

  Last week I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC held by O’Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb. I’ve wanted to attend this conference for a while now and finally had the opportunity to go this year. Overall this was both one of the better conferences that I’ve attended, and probably one of the worst expos as well (more on this later). In this post I’ll walk you through, from a very high level, my experience at the Web 2.0 Expo and what I thought about the event.

  Coverage

  The thing that pleased me most about this event was the full coverage it had of the Web 2.0 space. I knew going in that they wouldn’t just cover Programming and Technology, but they exceeded my expectations. A vast range of topics was covered, from HTML5 and the future of Web Browsers to topics on getting buzz for your product and interesting conversations about Social Media. The program had a good helping of workshops, sessions and discussions about Technology, Marketing, Biz Dev, and Design. It had something for everyone working in this space and made discussions going on in the Marketing and Social Media world easily accessible to developers.

  Workshops

  The workshops were great! The first one was with Alex Russell of Google, and aptly named “HTML5: Developing for the Desktop and Mobile”. He started off with a quick primer on the history of web browsers and how we got to where we are today. This was only important for framing his arguments for the necessity of HTML5, what he described as: HTML5 ~= HTML + CSS + JS APIs. He also asserted that, for those that weren’t paying attention, XHTML is dead.

  This workshop was incredibly informative, with an interesting CSS3 tutorial and discussions about how browsers think about your webpage and thus, how you should be thinking about your web pages. His exact quote was: “Think about your web pages the way a browser thinks about web pages.”

  The part that I found most useful was his tutorial on interesting ways to write less JS code by utilizing some built in HTML5 browser features. I won’t go into too much detail regarding this workshop as I plan on spending some time on the specifics in a future blog post.

  The second workshop “Building Cross-Platform Mobile Apps,” was with Jonathan Stark, the maintainer of the jQTouch Project. This was the main reason why I wanted to attend this event as I’m currently working on a project that uses the jQTouch framework. Admittedly, after Alex’s workshop I was concerned that I wouldn’t get much out of this workshop but I was thankfully mistaken. Although he touched on many of the same topics as Alex, he took a completely different approach. He made the assumption that we had all already bought into HTML5, but then did a side-by-side of the old Native vs Web argument. His arguments were tightly aligned with a recent post where I did the same comparison and validated some of my assumptions. When it came down to which one he views better he said, “It truly is a draw between native vs web with a slight leaning towards web,” but then went on to say, “I believe that apps are on their way out.” I agree.

  Jonathan also did an awesome tutorial on CSS3, discussed best practices for a successful mobile web app, and introduced jQTouch, Sencha Touch, and PhoneGap (for those who weren’t already aware of these tools). I will have more to come on all of this in an upcoming post.

  Sessions

  I attended 3 full days worth of workshops, keynotes, and sessions, so many that they all began to blur together. A lot was covered in these sessions - everything from ways to get media buzz to the value of Open APIs, as well as round table discussions on social media, culture, and change, and the value of UX for Startups.

  What was great about this conference in particular was the wide range of topics that was covered. The term “Web 2.0” represents something unique depending on your chosen field. I think this conference did a great job of exposing the unique challenges we have under the large Web 2.0 umbrella, and facilitated interesting discussions on how we can solve them. It was great to attend sessions on Node.js, but then sit in on discussions on getting media buzz for your product (something I typically wouldn’t think about as a programmer).

  Below is the complete list of sessions that I attended:

  Tuesday

  • Getting Media Buzz for Your Product Jennifer 8. Lee
  • Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To! Andy Budd
  • Social Media, Culture, and Change Jessica Faye Carter
  • What to Expect from Browsers in the Next Five Years: A Perspective Dion Almaer
  • The Free-for-All Web and the Secret Tyrants We All Are Deanna Zandt

  Wednesday

  • Personal, Relevant, Connected: Designing Integrated Mobile Experiences for Apps and Web Albert Shum, Paula Guntaur
  • Harnessing the Web’s New Indirect Channel: Open APIs in the Enterprise Sam Ramji
  • JavaScript is the New Black - Why Node.js is Going to Rock Your World Tom Hughes-Croucher
  • Scaling Web Applications with Cassandra Eben Hewitt
  • The Value of UX for Startups Whitney Hess
  • All Aboard? Turning New Users into Active Users Josh Elman
  • Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age Douglas Rushkoff

  I’m not an expert on all of these topics, but feel free to leave a comment below if you’d like additional information on any one of these sessions and I’ll do my best to lead you in the right direction.

  Keynotes

  I had mixed feelings about the keynotes. Some of it was pretty awesome, some of it wasn’t.

  Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., spoke first about “Thinking Hard About the Future (Video)”. His message was about tackling BIG problems, but starting first with having fun. He said something interesting to drive this point that connected well with the audience: “When the Wright brothers set out to fly they weren’t saying, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to invent the airline industry and we’re going to change global travel patterns,’ they were like, ‘Wow, do you think we could get up there and fly?!’”. I found this to be pretty interesting.

  The keynote that I enjoyed most was with Dennis Crowley, co-founder and CEO of Foursquare. I’m admittedly a long-term holdout in adopting Foursquare and always saw it as a silly check-in tool, but Dennis did a great job in changing the way I look at his product.

  He didn’t spend his time selling me on why Foursquare is great; he talked only about his vision for its future (Video) and how they are trying to change the location-based service space. They are looking at Foursquare as a tool to help you discover and engage with your surroundings, but also, and perhaps most importantly, how it can be used to change and drive social behavior. One of the things they are doing is launching things like the “Gym Rat” badge to encourage people to go to the gym. I don’t know about you but I can always use some additional encouragement to go to the gym.

  Another thing that I found impressive was this new tips feature. They envision it as being something where people from all over the world can leave little tips of content for a location which is then passed on to the user when they check in. Tips like “Go to the basement and check out this really weird statue.” This is a lot more than checking into a location and getting a badge. Check out his segment here: Web 2.0 Expo: Dennis Crowley.

  The last thing I will touch on regarding the keynotes was the eye-opening performance by Rana Sobhany. She demoed how she is able to DJ on 2 iPad devices. Now there wasn’t anything spectacular about her performance and I won’t speak to her DJing skills per se, but stick her in a room with 3 other DJ’s and you wouldn’t be able to tell which one was using the iPad devices. This is significant. It’s a testament to the versatility of the iPad and yet another example of how the iPad truly is a magical device.

  The Expo as an Expo

  So I titled this Blog Post “The Expo that wasn’t” because the expo part of it was truly lacking. When I think of the word “Expo” I think of crowds, booths, discovering interesting things, and discussing these things with the people behind them. This was the most underwhelming thing about the Web 2.0 Expo. It partly had to do with the space, which was very big, and partly to do with the lack of Expo “stuff”, which made it all seem very small. What’s more, the event coordinators neglected to schedule any time on the program for people to be on the Expo floor. The program was filled with end to end sessions, keynotes and other events, but left the Expo portion as an afterthought.

  The only time I was able to make it to the Expo floor was during lunch, but that was only because the lunch lines cut through it. You are then kindly directed by the doormen to the seating area which was outside of the Expo floor. I probably wouldn’t have entered this space if it weren’t for the lunch line, and I definitely wasn’t losing my place in line after listening to speakers all morning. The expo featured things like Windows Mobile Phone 7 and a SenchaTouch kiosk and some other notable features but it just didn’t do it for me. It was almost as if the event coordinators remembered last minute that this event was named Web 2.0 “Expo” and hastily put something together and then strategically designed the program to keep people away. I’m hoping they did something more significant around the expo on the 4th day (we had left by then), but I’m guessing they didn’t.

  It’s funny, but many attendees began to refer to the Expo as the Web 2.0 Conference.

  Ok ok, rant over.

  I hate to end this on a negative note because all-in-all I had a great time. The “No Expo” Expo was probably a good thing because everything else combined was more than enough for this attendee. We skipped the 4th and final day to catch an afternoon flight home and to avoid information overload, but you wouldn’t have known we missed anything. I got more than enough out of the first 3 days and plan on dissecting what I learned at the 2 workshops in an upcoming blog post. Stay tuned!

  I invite you to share your thoughts about the Web 2.0 Expo if you had the privilege of attending, or if you have questions (or if you would like to hear me rant some more), by commenting below.

   

  The opinions expressed here represent those of the author and not those of Constant Contact, Inc. Read Blog Terms

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