Future of Web Apps Summit — Day 1

Following are some highlights from my notes after the first day of the Future of Web Apps Summit in San Francisco. Overall, its been a great experience, with a nice synergy of speakers and useful presentations/tips. Here’s a bit o jerky to chew on:

Dick Hardt of Sxip opened with an entertaining, metaphor-filled powerpoint. In a nutshell, we all need to develop a “V1agra” app — one that enables the user to do what they otherwise are unable to do. Smart and secure, yet marketable use of identity seems to be the Sxip pitch, as the information collected in an Internet users multiple accounts and usernames help “predict future behavior based on what people have done in the past.

Next, Kevin Rose presented a little Digg history lesson, and then treated us to some apps and widgets in development (as well as some blog plug-ins that is slowly rolling out, i.e. at feedburner).

Rose touched on themes that were repeated throughout the afternoon — “keep it simple and rewarding,” “destroy the garbage.” Stamen is incubating a number of new features for Digg.

He credited the “Inside LiveJournal’s Backend” PDF as an inspiration and door opener.

That’s it for now — I’m off to an open-bar shindig hosted by the fine folks at Google especially for Summit attendees. More breakdown to come… Technorati’s Tantek Çelik was kind enough to post his entire presentation on Microformats at his Web site. Check it out.

Great photos of all speakers and the laptop-infested geek scene at flickr and also these gems at Laughing Squid.