Web 2.0 Expo - Day 2
Another day of very inspiring ideas and people. The jet-lag is wearing off as well!
Today was great, great, great. The conference proper kicked off today (yesterday was all workshops and was attended by about half the people) with lots and lots of great people and topics to choose from. I couldn’t resist seeing the demo of Adobe’s new product, currently code-named “Thermo”.
Thermo will allow designers to create rich internet applications from wireframes or designs, while also producing clean code for developers to work with. It’s an interesting concept which could really bridge the gap between members of a design/development team - but part of me thinks that it could also lead to some bad behaviour; in essence it’s so easy to make something dance around on the screen, you might as well. As with all web creation tools; the who and why will still be more important. The how will just be easier. I am officially all RIAd out for this week.
Matt Jones (Dopplr) and Tom Coates (Fire Eagle) gave a great talk called “Polite, Pertinent...and Pretty” where they discussed the development of ubiquitous computing and personal informatics services. In a world where even your shoes can gather data about you, how should/can we make use of information to enhance our lives?
I was then really lucky to join Matt Jones and a lot of other extremely clever people in a small group discussion on data portability and online identity. Even if I was to summarise the conversation here it would take a solid hour - but suffice to say that we didn’t solve the problems of how people represent themselves flexibly and safely online. Maybe tomorrow.
Erika Hall from Mule Design presented a session on writing and constructing copy for interfaces; which is a topic very close to my heart. Writing clear, consise, relevant text to support the user journey is not something that comes across as sexy or “web 2.0”, but it can be the difference between an interface works and is delightful, and one that is a chore to use. Two thumbs up for this session; especially the excellent examples of how not to write for the web :)
Gavin Bell (Nature) gave a cool talk on the psychology of web design. It’s not a subject that really lends itself to a 30 minute talk, but he did a good job in front of a ridiculously big crowd.
After hours I met up with people from Federated Media; representing “Team Ireland” at the Yahoo Brickhouse event and a party at the Adaptive Path offices. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
