I know it’s been conference this and conference that around here lately. I’ve got my web hat on and will no doubt soon take it off, put on another hat and resume back to blogging all about the place like I normally do. But I brought the conference up because after the conference my Facebook friends quadrupled, that is I went from three friends to 12. This is why.

When you get added as someone’s friend in Facebook, their friends can see that you’ve been added and then might think, oh well I met or know her, I’ll add her as a friend as well. This can happen at your end too. I added an old work colleague tonight and through that another old work colleague saw that I’d been added to her friend so she added me to hers. Confused? That’s because it happens so quickly you’re left shaking your head.

I’m writing this down because I still don’t know how long I’ll stick at this Facebook thing. I’m hanging around at the moment because I’m curious and am genuinely interested in maintaining contact with friends that have moved away from me. I’m not so interested in adding people that I see or work with all the time because I see or work with them all the time. I’m also conscious of what I write on people’s walls because everyone else can read it. It’s like being at home at night with the blinds up and the curtains open and the lights on. Everyone can see in and see what you’re up to. I’m not a leave the blinds open and the lights on kind of girl. I like my privacy.

What I’m saying is that I’m not that active on Facebook now. I’d rather just watch and participate periodically when I feel like it. I haven’t installed every application, I don’t send gifts willy nilly, I don’t ask lots of questions, I haven’t rated any movies, etc etc. I also reserve the right to cut and run, although I’ve heard it’s difficult, if not impossible, to delete a Facebook account.

For the moment, I’ll let Facebook sit around like a fairly dormant virus and hope that it doesn’t take hold.

Read my previous summaries of the conference: one and two. This is the third and final part of my Web Directions South wrapup.

The closing talk on the first day was by Chris Wilson, an Internet Explorer Platform Architect from Microsoft. He opened the talk with who he is and what he does and put up this slide of his haircut from the 80s – I’m guessing. He asked if anyone remembered the Mosaic web browser. A fair amount of people did, including me.

His talk was about moving the web forward, but because he’s from Microsoft, there was a lot of talking about their web browser and its use, or not, of standards.

He said there were three main groups of people when it comes to web users. That is 1 – developers – and he acknowledged it’s painful for this group (think numerous hacks to get pages to work in different web browsers). 2 – browser vendors – browser hacking is lucrative and security is hard (think numerous browser security patches). 3 – everyone else – have to consider browser upgrades for this group.

He did say they’re working on a new web browser and committed to working with standards, and it will have to work for his ‘mom’s banking’ otherwise he’s in the poo because she has his cellphone number and can hassle him.

There’s no rhyme or reason to the order I’ve summarised what I heard at the conference, so I’m jumping to the morning of day two and Scott Berkun’s opening talk The Myths of Innovation. We were lucky to open with this and to close with Mark Pesce, it helped make a great day.

Takeout’s from Scott’s talk:

• The less you use the word innovation, the more likely you are to innovate. It’s hard to define what the word actually means. I liked this because it made me think of team meetings at work where we discuss innovation a fair bit.
• To innovate though, you need to delegate responsibility, allow mistakes – as they will be made, and reward initiative.
• Google have a 20% rule. That is one day a week is your own time to play around and hopefully think up some great new ideas. This was 3M’s idea from the late 1940s.
• Someone at the end asked how to get people on board with a new innovation and Scott said to involve them in the process from the beginning as they’re less likely to feel threatened.

He’s written a book about the Myth’s of Innovation and after listening to this talk I’d really like to read it.

Lastly, but by no means least as it’s a topic close to my heart, was Lisa Herrod’s talk on Usability: More than skin deep. Points of interest:

• Personas for web testing are often shallow, they don’t usually consider users with disabilities.
• A W3C check doesn’t mean the site is accessible. A software accessibility tool can’t check for things like contrasting colour. A holistic approach is needed.
• Role specific checklists are a good way to go. Therefore each person throughout the process of building the site has a checklist of accessibility items to check off. The person responsible for the front end has the most items to check off, but accessibility is not their sole responsibility as other team members have items to check also.

Our website at work has been following the accessibility guidelines for four years now and quite often when talking to colleagues who are responsible for content and front end development, accessibility and usability are words I use very frequently when providing feedback, but it’s really worthwhile. Oh, and Lisa also kept saying accessibility expertise when building a website is essential.

After having learned a fair amount at work and in my reading about accessibility, usability and web standards I really cringe when I think of that website I built about five years ago that used frames before I really knew about CSS etc.

There were other sessions I attended but the ones I’ve written about I found the most interesting. And before we all knew it the conference was over and it was off to a nearby venue for the after party sponsored by Microsoft. It was a good way to finish the conference and I met some people I hadn’t met yet. Consequently my Facebook contacts have expanded threefold and now I can see a good use for Facebook. Hint, these sorts of contact details are on my About page.

The first day of the conference – particularly the afternoon – went quite slowly and in the early afternoon sessions I struggled to stay awake but the second day was over before I knew it. It did end on a high with Mark Pesce’s talk as I pointed out yesterday.

To continue along with the free drinks time I had in Sydney, Adobe put drinks on after the conference Thursday night. Microsoft paid for the party after the conference on Friday which was down the road at the Shelbourne. As that one was away from the conference venue it was more of a party vibe.

But back to the conference.

The main point I’ve taken away with me is this – mobile. Many of the talks were either about it, or they mentioned it. That is, applications and/or websites that will work on mobile devices. Can you imagine the website you built five years ago using tables or, god forbid – frames, working on a really small screen? For a start it would take forever to download and then it wouldn’t display very well because of the fixed width type layout and no stylesheet telling it how to display on a small screen or handheld device.

Brian Fling talked about Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 = ? He said:

• Mobile subscribers are about 1/5th of the population of the world and half of them have internet access through their mobiles. This is more than the amount of internet users using a desktop computer.
• By 2010 mobile users will be about half of the world’s population.
• Mobile will revolutionise the way we gather and use the internet probably within the next three or so years.
• Mobiles provide the ability to get location-based services – eg where good restaurants are etc
• The mobile web browser is the next killer app
• Mobile web applications are the future
• The mobile user experience sucks at the moment
• The mobile carrier is the new ‘c’ word (think walled garden – Laurel Papworth talked about this at the conference and on her blog)
• The iPhone is the first mobile device worthy of being called mobile 2.0. (My note here – look at the discussions over at the Whirlpool forums. iPhone talk is hot hot hot.)
• CSS3 is ideal for mobile development

An aside to the mobile talk – iTouch was also buzzing around the conference. I’m a bit out of touch here (excuse the bad pun) but iTouches must have just been released and a couple of people I saw at WebJam on Saturday night had one so I was able to have a bit of a play. iTouch is the iPhone without the phone and camera components and it’s really easy and intuitive to use. I imagine, therefore, that the iPhone is quite similar. By the way they’d sold out at Myer in Sydney centre and no more are due for two weeks.

I wrote yesterday that I went along to every female speaker’s talk and this included George Oates from Flickr. I’d met George at an Adelaide Flickr meet not that long ago and hadn’t realised she was speaking at the conference until I reacquainted myself with the program.

She talked about how Flickr started – it was based on an online game that a bunch of them used to play and Flickr is similar in many respects. She said that the less rules of behaviour there are, the more room for creativity there is. The photos are a good way of telling stories about people and getting them involved in the Flickr community. But to start this community off there had to be human contact at the beginning. Flickr staff members are still heavily involved in discussions and so forth. Unfortunately she ran out of time to finish her talk and was therefore unable to take questions at the end.

I have one more post to come about this conference – tomorrow or the next day.