Live Blogging The Future of Web Apps
part III

Tom has obviously had a lot of coffee this morning. That said, this looks like it could be good.

Design and Web 2.0
What it means to design something for the
Tom Coats
Yahoo.com

It is all about round corners. ;)

Web 2.0: Buzzword, conference, marketing, a bubble(?), all and less.
An attempt to make order.
Markus Angermeier's concept/map of 2.0

Then: Separate bits. Now: A huge accumulationf of testicles.
Emphasis of mash-ups. Browse news by star sign. Astronewsology. :)

Mash-ups allow people to navigate one data source in terms of the other. Every new service can be built on top of existing services. Every service added can make every other service more important. Consequences: Creative potential, accelerated innovation, increased competition, components and specialized services.

There is money to be made here:

• Use APIs to drive people to your stuff
• Whatever people build brings people back to you (Amazon is the king of this)
  
• Make your services more attractive and useful with less central development
  
• Use syndicated content as a platform: example: Google Maps
• Turn your APi into a pay-for service

If you are not benefiting from the system (collaboration, social netowrking in the ecosystem) you end up disconnected in the backwater.

Choosing what to build:
The big shift: What can I build that will make the whole web better.
Another way: How can I add value to the aggregate web?
Is it via a data source? exploring, manipulating, and using data

Quotes Tim O'Reilly:
The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.

(Note: If you haven't read that article, go do it now.)

Architectural Principles:

Recommends: The Application of Weblike Design to Data.

1. Look to add value to the aggregate web of data
2. Build everything for normal users, developers and machines
   
3. Start designing with data, not with pages (navigable, explorable, reusable data)
   
4. Identify your first oder objects and make them addressable.
   
5. Use readable, reliable, hackable, unique and easily structured URLs (third mention today)
   Permanent reference
   1-to-1 correlation w/ concepts
   use directories to represent hierarchy
   not reflect the underlying technology
   Reflect the structure of the data
   Be predictable, guessable, hackable
   Be as human readable as possible
   Be, or expose, identifiers
   A sign of design quality
   
6. Correlate with external identifier schemes (or coin a new standard). If 100 blogs are talking about the same thing, then it would be good to know. Find a way for pages to reference the same place/page/thing. Single IDs and logins. Single sources for data and info. David Weinberg.
   
7. Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces
   Type 1: Destination page
   Type 2: List view page
   Type 3: Manipulations interface: Example: Digg spy
8. Parallel data representations (too difficult to blog
   
9. Make your data discoverable (RSS, XML and such)
   

Download the presentation on Plasticbag.org