Monday, February 20, 2006

Thoughts from Mashup Camp Day 1

I don’t sleep well on the road so I’m exhausted. I’m going to post a couple of quick thoughts and then hit the sack.

• It was great to see Ward. When he got up to suggest a session topic he got a round of applause.
• I went to the morning session on Business Models for Mashups. Most interesting to me was the number of mashup developers not looking for funding. Either they don’t care much (it’s a hobby) or they think they can succeed w/o the extra cash. Otherwise, the session was lots of questions and not many answers.
• I spent lunch hanging out with Yoz from Ning. Ning is fascinating. Not sure I understand the business model (I think it’s ad-funded, but there aren’t many ads) but it’s definitely something I need to look into further.
• Session after lunch was on gadgets, widgets and modules. Interesting to see the major differences in each of the approaches. Scott Isaacs made some interesting points about the lack of an application model in the browser. But several folks seemed to imply that a web based application hitting a local web server was a good approach to offline apps. Why wouldn’t you just build a smart client app? The productivity of Windows Forms blows AJAX away (for now).
• I wanted to see Lawrence Lessig’s session on Creative Commons, but the room was too crowded. Similar problem to the Business Models for Mashups session, but even more so. I went and read email.
• Last session was about architecture patterns for AJAX applications, hosted by Scott Isaacs. It was more of a presentation than a discussion, but very interesting.
• Evening reception was sponsored by Yahoo! They had a cool ice sculpture and branded drinks – Yahootinis – with litecubes in them. My son Patrick is going to love these.
• I got to meet Sandy Kemsley, who is friends with my friend Chris Church who helped me get into Mashup Camp. I was instructed to buy Sandy a drink or three, but Yahoo! sprung for an open bar, so there was no buying. But we did have an interesting chat about workflow, business process and Office as a platform.