Web Directions South 2007 – other points of note

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.