I did try to take notes when I could, though. Rather than giving a rundown of all the talks, I thought I’d give two overaching themes that came up again and again in conference sessions.

Social Media

Social media is what’s hip this year. Twitter, Facebook, BrightKite, it’s all about the social. My favorite twitter from the conference:

OH, everywhere at webvisions: “something something Social Media something something facebook something something twitter”

With that in mind, I attended Erica O’Grady and Kelsey Ruger’s workshop on social media, only to discover they were trying to pack 3.5 hours of content into a 2.5 hour timeslot (thanks to miscommunication by the conference organizers). The good news, though, is on the school level I seem to be doing the right things — thinking about Twitter, plotting our plans for Facebook, recruiting students for blogging. The bad news, though, is there are still no easy solutions for my problems (and the problems of so many others on campus): No content, no one to create content, no money to hire content creators. I’m torn between a desire for edited content that looks as polished as a general’s shoe and what a drunk web producer once confided to me over her third vodka tonic — it doesn’t matter that it’s not polished because it will find an audience (thanks to Google).

O’Grady suggested for content that you find the people who are passionate about your organization and get them blogging. Passion transfers well in a social medium. Finding those people here is easy — they’re everywhere in Public Health, and I’m willing to bet everyone on campus knows at least one person who loves what they do or loves to be here on campus. But when will they get the time to write? If you figure you need three posts a week to keep your blog reader minimally satisfied, that’s 1 1/2-3 hours a week of writing.

Another question that came up that remains unanswered is whether it’s right to chase people across social networks. Facebook could be tomorrow’s Friendster; BrightKite could be tomorrow’s Facebook. And if social profile portability is “the future,” does the school/university also become portable?

One last point she brought up is transparency — you must embrace it. In social media, having transparency and abiding by ethics online will gain you a reputation of being an honest player in the social sphere. Opacity and dishonesty, though, will sink your efforts faster than a pair of concrete overshoes. One of UW’s greatest struggles right now is making things more transparent and trying to just be honest and ethical in “meatspace,” and it’s a struggle that plays itself out in the media with complaints about how this organization operates and the occasional ethical breaches that get splashed all over front pages. Transparency can only come through open, honest communication. In a sense, social media is both the problem and the solution for UW — you give up control of your message (and the last thing anyone wants to do around here is give up control), but at the same time pushing your message out into social media could reward you with a far better relationship with your core constituents. It means that the university communicates directly, honestly, and forthrightly. Are people ready to do that? Can we find people who can communicate that way, and can the do so without certain higher-ups and lower-downs freaking out about whether the message is “consistent?”

The social is already on campus. How will we respond?

The future of web development

I’ve never had one of those “mind-blowing” talks at a conference, with radical alterations of reality. But David Verba’s “Faster, Cheaper, Better” did make me tear up an e-mail I’d been writing and get me thinking about the problems of web development on the university level. His premise was simple — it’s getting easier and cheaper to do web development (he worked on the ill-fated Whole People project that turned into a $20M writeoff for Whole Foods; today the same project would probably top out at $1M), people can put together projects with incredibly small and cheap teams (the “give us a weekend and enough beer” philosophy), and APIs, frameworks, and libraries mean there’s much less actual code to write. Meanwhile, though, there are still “hard” things in development — the sheer complexity of larger projects still requiring huge teams (e.g. writing flight software for an F-22), the need for open communication on teams, and the tension between agile development’s bias towards “throwing it up there” and user-centered development’s bias toward “doing right by the users.”

It got me thinking, though, about how we do web development here on campus. We still do things with larger teams and a top-down approach. We build assuming something needs to last forever, because in all likelihood it will be up forever (or at least 10 years). The concepts of “agile” and “user-centered” haven’t really impacted this campus yet.

But as the older, larger teams get cut down to size by layoffs and shifting priorities, there’s still a huge amount of web development to be done on campus. Agile teams with fewer members, a focus on frameworks and DRY methodologies, and a de-emphasis of “build to last” code would be incredibly effective at dealing with the small, local issues people have here on campus. User-centered teams with strengths in usability and accessibility, a sense of consistency, and a similar emphasis on frameworks and DRY would be just as effective in dealing with global web design and development issues that have bedeviled this campus for years.

But I wonder if this campus can make that shift. This campus is highly decentralized. What’s needed is a team that can move quickly, partner with school and department web people, and focus on deliverables in a timely manner as cheaply as possible. And it would be constantly iterative, constantly user-focused, and constantly repeatable.

Verba made one point clear — the days of the large web team are over. The days of the small, nimble web team loaded with brilliant specialists and flexible generalists is here.

Is this campus ready to make the switch?

I’ll dump my unedited notes for all the sessions into a future post.

Presentation: Marketing-UW-on-Facebook

Attendees:

Ryan Otsis (iSchool)
Jeff Hendrickson (UW Marketing)
Melinda Van Wingen (Simpson Center for Humanities)
Ryan Becker (Office of Research)
Elise Daniel (UW Marketing)
Tony Chang (UW Technology)
Gina Hills (UW Marketing)
Melody Winkle (UW Technology)
Patrick Chidsey (UW Career Center)
Matt Wojciakowski (Carlson Leadership & Public Service Center)
Heather Larson (Hall Health)
Todd Mildon (Office of the Registrar)
David Cox (UW Technology)
Andre Tan (Streaming Video and TV Technologies)
Lauren Ray (Educational Outreach)
Dylan Wilbanks (School of Public Health and Community Medicine)
Mick Westrick (Foster School of Business)
Jason Cijvan (UW Technology - Catalyst)
Kirsten Atik (Undergraduate Academic Affairs)
Christine Tawatao (UW Libraries)
Scott Macklin (UW School of Education)
L.A. Smith (Foster School of Business)
Andrew Krueger (Foster School of Business)
Jocelyn Milici (Foster School of Business)
Derek Winslow (United Way)
Emma O’Neill (Center for Career Services)

Our apologizes, if any names were left-off, misspelled, or incomplete. There were alot of people at the meeting and we tried our best to get names noted. Please send me membership corrections if you find them.

Things we talked about after Elise gave her presentation:

Facebook stats from the School of Public Health (shared by Dylan Wilbanks) - Thanks Dylan

———-
Q:The School is considering creating a web presence on Facebook, including the creation of a group just for SPHCM students and alumni. Would you join this group if the School created it?

85 (36.80%) — Yes
56 (24.24%) — I do not have a Facebook account and do not want to create one
42 (18.18%) — I don’t know
29 (12.55%) — No
19 (8.23%) — I don’t have a Facebook account, but I would sign up in order to participate in this group

n=231 currently enrolled graduate students in the School of Public Health (of ~725 total grad students)
———-

Dylan did get several comments pertaining to this question in the free-form section of the survey. There were a few saying that Facebook would be a good idea, others saying not to go with Facebook or MySpace as they are “unprofessional” or “too juvenile,” and a couple others expressing apprehension at alumni or future employers mingling with students and being able to see student profiles. There was also a suggestion for going with LinkedIn.

Lastly, we are always looking for agenda items so if you have them please send them my way (ttchang@u.washington.edu).

Presented by John Musser (Founder of Programmable Web and a great guy to talk with.)

John provided a well rounded presentation on enterprise mashups. Cleverly debunking the myths and focusing on the data and realities of enterprise mashups. He also gives an analysis of mashup tools and expected enterprise mashup future trends.

The Hype:

ZapThink’s 2008 SOA Forecast:

“The world of enterprise mashups will come into its own in 2008, and become what many people
are calling the “killer use-case” for SOA.”

The Surveys:

Source: Information Week, September 2007

I like this public access pie chart where it shows 43% of IT web applications are either developing or have deployed applications using data from publicly accessible web sites. I wonder if that meant both web pages and web services? With the trending towards RESTful APIs returning payloads that are XHTML and ATOM based, does making the difference between web pages and web services matter any longer?

What is a mashup?

I think these points are excellent in that our vision for ROA, which used to be SOA for the UW, hits upon our goal of serendipity and quick creation of innovative web applications. This is in contrast to our past designs where we focused mainly on long-living applications.

Here are some points that make looking at mashups different than the way we currently or used to see things.

For the UW this would be “uses a Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA)”

What makes mashups different?

See slide #10

Adapted from ProgrammableWeb.com Web2.0 Expo slides

What I like best about this matrix is that it gets to the heart of the same decisions and tradeoffs we made here at the UW; both to our webservices and application development strategy.

Web 2.0 is definitely coming into the enterprise and here is a list of those things:

The Long Tail of IT - a really good slide on how mashups address the long tail of IT which is characterized as:

See slide #19

I like this pie chart from Information Week, Sept 2007 which asks the question about how folks feel about non-IT staff developing their own mashups. Which for the record I believe is the right thing for the UW to do! Of course making sure we work through all the important challenges while we advance to that end state.

I like the comparison that Microsoft Excel is currently still the mashup tool of choice. While this new Web 2.0 era is more about web based accessibility of mashups as well as real time access to that information.

John also makes another comparison of mashups that makes sense. Enterprise mashups are focused on implementations that target a specific business problem. Making solutions much more agile vs our current monolithic systems which were created to meet global central processing. Now those systems are expected to solve targeted and quick business problems which it can’t. This of course results in business opportunity loss and frustration directed at many IT shops.

Web Oriented Architecture

John presents a new acronym, WOA, which he describes as Web Oriented Architecture however his description fits almost perfectly with Resource Oriented Architecture. Especially with the comment that WOA is a unified means to identify resources online.ROA is what we currently subscribe to here at the UW.

See slide #29 for data related to the percentage of open APIs by type. RESTful APIs rise to the top with 68% seen in the wild by ProgrammableWeb.

How will you build your mashup? Fundamental commonality: HTTP, REST, XML, RSS, Atom, Ajax, XHTML

List of mashup tools presented:

Top 4 enterprise mashup challenges:

1. Immature Marketplace - early adopter phase with lots of change
2. SLAs for APIs - lack of SLA as a barrier to adoption
3. Security - data access rights; lack of identity standards; compliance regulations
4. Data quality and trust - applies to both internal and external data

Mashup Advice for IT
1. Beware the hype, but don’t ignore
More opportunity than risk here, and it’s going to happen anyway…

2. Got SOA? Make it a mashup platform
Mashup-enable IT infrastructure: use open standards, expose services

3. Start simply
Small apps, pilots, evaluations

4. Think tools, both for IT and business
Tools to enable wider adoption, speed creation, enforce policy

5. Add governance as needed
Mashup-aware policies for security and external services

Trends to watch:

SLAs beginning to appear:

Impact assessment of Mashups in The Enterprise

eTech key take aways:

I was unable to find the presentation slides from Web 2.0 so here is something else I found that covers mostly the same thing.

Basics:

1. Google runs the web apps (just web apps only)
2. Handles the entire lifecycle of an app
3. App runs on Google Infrastructure

This is not a VM instance and not comparable to Amazon’s EC2; its just for web apps

This is an alternate to the traditional LAMP stack so instead you are using the same Google infrastructure that Google uses:

- GoogleIDs
- BigTable
- Google File System
- essentially you are using same building blocks as Google

NO batch cron jobs available

Scalable infrastructure
- Runs fault tolerant on both the web front end and persistence data store
- Automatic tuning of processing capabilities based on load
- Currently supports only Python. Google wants more feedback from community on what other programming languages they should support
- SDK is available so local development can emulate the Google platform. SDK is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows

Web based admin console provided

Scalable data store / persistence layer
- Called BigTable (this is not SQL)
- No relational databases here
- No joins on tables

There is Google SQL syntax to retrieve data called GQL almost identical to SQL however we didnt go through how it compared up with all the different CRUD operations in SQL.

Useful apis provided by the Google framework

1. Email Api - to send email
2. Http apis - to GET URIs - especially useful for calling webservices
3. Google Ids

No charge for technical preview however there is a quota on usage

When the service is ready for production use, then you pay for what you use only. Processing power and bandwidth will be charged on individual rates. The platform will automatically scale based on demand.

Pretty much everything about the platform is still being developed and of course they want the customers involved every step of the way. No date for when this will come out of technical preview.

YES, you can use GoogleIDs provided thru Google Apps for Edu or Domains. In fact you can sign up thru your own domain. I have done this for our test Google Apps for Education domain. I believe you can do this for team edition domains as well by going to http://appengine.google.com/a/ /. I am on a waiting list now.

Anyone know of a Python project on campus so we can do a trial study on this?

eTech Take Aways:

1. Lets try this out with a python project on campus to better understand Google’s hosting infrastructure.
2. Exploring outsourced application hosting with large vendors like Google and Amazon allows us to create more options and opportunities for our customers.

Ryan Sarver – Director of Consumer Products (Skyhook Wireless/Loki)

This session was about introducing practical tools that allow developers to add location capabilities to a website or application.

Location adds a new level of extra meaning and metadata so you can push meaningful data to the user based on a person’s location. This will give your users another level of context to work with based on where they are.

Location data comes in different variations:
1. Lat and long
2. Polygon area
3. Street address
4. Street intersections
5. Area title = “south of market”

Due to privacy risks there are means of blurring location such as using general location data like “I am in Fremont” vs a street address.

Some showcased tools:

My.loki.com

Here is an example website which will detect your current location based on wifi location (mapped out wireless access points ) and allow you to share location with friends. This site and its associated browser plugins is based on the Skyhook wireless SDK. www.skyhookwireless.com

Fireball: www.fireballapp.com
At the Web2.0 Expo, attendees were given access to a new application still in development called Fireball.

Taken from the Fireball site:

“Fireball is a location-based mashup designed to find out where your friends are. Instead of creating Yet Another Social Network, forcing you to re-add all your friends (AGAIN), we just tie together the best tools out there (that you probably already use). This includes using Twitter (for messaging and your social/attention network), Upcoming (for event and place names) and Fire Eagle (for location queries and updates).”

The location input is through Twittering, so it requires a user to type in their location, while Loki only requires you to push a button to determine current location.

FireEagle.com a Yahoo! service

Taken from the FireEagle site:

“Fire Eagle is a system that brokers location information. It is designed to help users safely share information about their location with sites, services and people on the Internet.
The service has two major functions for users—it allows a user to update their location and then gives them full control of how and where they share that location. A user can perform these functions on the central site, but can also update or access their location data using any other authorized 3rd party application - on the web, on a desktop application or on a mobile device. Applications that access a user’s location information can then personalize their service accordingly.”

This system serves as repository for users to store location information. Applications are then developed against it to either query for location or input new location data. The system has tools which allow users to control application and data access to their own location data.

Geolocation Methods:

Triangulate
Determining position of an unknown object relative to known objects

• wifi (wireless access points - maps out wireless access points)
• gps (satellites - one meter)
• cell towers

Accuracy:
GPS - 1 meter
Wi-Fi - 20 meters
Cell Tower - 2000 meters

Here is a good link that describes the various location providers currently available.
http://www.locationaware.org/wiki/Location_providers

Here is a link to existing standards for location data
http://www.locationaware.org/wiki/Existing_Standards

Mobile Location APIs

- iPhone core location API
- WIFI, Cell tower
- Symbian S60 location api
- GPS, A-GPS
- J2ME JSR-179 (Java)
- GPS, device-specific

More info for developers

Skyhook SDK
www.skyhookwireless.com

Where Widgets
http://developer.where.com

Cell Tower Data:
- developer.yahoo.com/yrb/zonetag
- www.opencellid.org
- celldb.org

More ways to update your location:

* Get Dopplr to tell Fire Eagle the city you’re in
* Send your location to the Twitter user Firebot
* Install the Navizon client on your iPhone to update your location every few minutes
* Use ZoneTag on Nokia 60 phones to broadcast your location automatically

eTech TakeAways:

1. We can start exploring these new location aware technologies NOW and determine what works and doesn’t as it relates to the technology and more importantly privacy issues.

2. Start thinking about various possibilities here that would add real world value to our UW community.

3. Lets find a study problem that would be best served through location awareness and solve it.

Speaker: Brian Fling (Fling Media)

This was a 3-hour work shop given during the first day of the conference. This workshop goes thru the basics of mobile technology and explains the current and possible future mobile environment. The talk also included a healthy dose of iPhone development.

Brian takes us through the jargon map for the mobile landscape and further explains mobility using a layered diagram. See slide #56

A slide of the Top Network Operators. See slide #59

A slide of various GSM Mobile Networks and their speeds. See slide #63

A pie chart comparing various mobile devices. See slide #67

A table listing various mobile platforms and their descriptions such as Java ME, Palm, iPhone, etc… See slide #69

A table listing various mobile operating systems and their descriptions such as Symbian, Windows mobile, OS X, etc… See slide #71

A table listing various application frameworks and their descriptions such as BREW, Web, Flash lite, etc… See slide #73

An awesome video showing why companies are finding it hard to innovate with mobile phones due to government and industry restrictions. The video is taken during Jason Devitt’s (founder of Skydeck) appearance before the US congress on July 11th 2007.

Here are a couple quotes from Brian that I certainly agree with - “Mobile will revolutionize the way we gather and interact with information in the next two years.” & “Mobile has the potential to reach anybody through any medium”

Mobile 2.0 is used to describe the current and new advancements (evolution) with mobile phones and devices.

Brian offers 5 points to why the mobile device is unique as a computing platform.

1. First truly personal mass media
2. First always-on mass media
3. First always-carried mass media
4. Only mass media with a built in payment channel
5. Offers point of thought

See slide #106

An important mobility feature that is changing mobile usage is location awareness. Methods of triangulation to provide location data: wifi access points, gps, and cell towers.

Location awareness brings with it many opportunities to help bring a new level of context and value to users. How does knowing whether your customer is in close proximity to your office affect how your site and data is presented to the user?

A good slide on the mobile evolution based on types of phones. See slide #145

This slide shows the differences between Web 1.0 & Web 2.0. See slide #148

Good summary of Mobile 2.0. See slide #158

See slide #187 for a list of iPhone strengths

Types of iPhone Applications:

1. Productivity (eg. Calendar)
2. Utility (eg. Weather reports)
3. Immersive (eg. Use of accelerometer, physical movement of device)

A comparison of benefits between web apps vs iPhone apps. See slide #235

Brian’s suggestion: “Build Web Apps first. iPhone Apps second.”

A comparison between network speeds such as EDGE vs Wi-Fi. See slide #255

Brian shows off his Leaflets technology which he uses to showcase an iPhone web application and describe iPhone web application best practices. See slide #266

eTech key take aways:

1. The number of iPhone/iPodTouch devices on the UW campus should reinforce our development focus on Safari webkit applications.

2. Web applications for mobile devices will provide a new vehicle for UW data and information to reach our constituents around the world like never before. For example, we can tackle research which is taking place in developing countries where data connectivity is challenging.

3. Location awareness within mobile devices will help enhance the services we can bring to students, faculty, and researchers in every UW campus. A simple example is an interactive campus map on a mobile device which guides a student from one class to another in real time.

4. Taking pop quizzes to the next level, where timed quizzes can be given to students any time of the day.

Speaker: Daniel Appelquist (Senior Technology Strategist - Vodafone)

Daniel predicts that within 5 years, the majority of Web usage worldwide will be mobile. Mobile application developers are increasingly choosing the web as a platform. This is helping break up closed carriers.

Developing countries are driving mobile usage due to the fact mobile phones are more accessible than traditional computers. Mobile phones are a powerful platforms because they are always close to the individual, almost always on, and people usually do not typically share their phone with others so it is a very personal and social device.

Mobile 2.0 is used as a term for describing the next wave of mobile advancements. Here is a sample list of these advancements:

SMS -> IM, mobile blogging
Java Games -> Connected Applications
Presence & Push-To-Talk -> VOIP applications
WAP sites -> Web sites that adapt for mobile browsers
WAP pus -> RSS Readers
Location based services -> Proximity and location-aware services
Content comsumption -> Content creation (e.g. mobile blogging)
Carrier/Operator chooses -> User chooses

Top 11 Mobile 2.0 Trends:

See slide #8

Why is Mobile Different?

See slide #10

Mobile Web Best Practices and Ajax

Start at slide #11

eTech key take aways:

His team is connected to Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.

Feedsync was called simple file sharing for RSS. Oh, also Microsoft announced a new service recently, called Live Mesh and it has FeedSync baked in deep. (ugh, I hate that term, but it works.)

With feedsync the data is multi-master meaning it can come from and go to anywhere. All endpoints get the same result, eventually. As he points out, if I shut my laptop lid for two weeks it will be out of sync, but when I open up, the machine will sync to RSS feed.

It is protocol independent, lightweight, extensible and preserves conflicting data. which means that it doesn’t just keep the last one, or a merged version, but saves all version. They are hoping there will be creative Commons and Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

What are other ways to sync? iTunes to Ipod, Phone/PDA to PC, rsync and some of the new ways (sugarsync, dropbox, etc) are some examples of point to point syncing.

In the xml, some of the new tags, focus on giving it a unique id. URNs or other methods are ok. There is also sync metadata there too. there is also some history tags to differentiate who did what when and on what device, so that you can tell the update you did on your phone with the one you did on your laptop.

feedSync is not domain specific, meaning it works with email, music, web pages, voice data, etc. For example you can update your calendar from an evite or update the evite from your calendar. FeedSync takes care of the communication between the two services.
Here’s the audio recording for this first part of the talk. (length = 21:26)

He gives a demonstration where he adds a note with some to-do items on one laptop back at his desk via VPN and then goes the to laptop here at the podium, signs in to the service, and the notes app has his notes from the remote machine. When there is a conflict in editing, the notes gives you an alert.

they have examples that work in python, and .net.

For a real life example, he is talking about a project with a NGO in Afghanistan. The group needed to get information from office to office but the infrastructure in the country is minimal and slow. So the keep their data in MS Access files, and sync the data via a server connected by satellites. they figured out a way to send access databases via SMS. Who’d a thunk?
Here’s the audio recording for this second part of the talk. (length = 37:57)

Now he’s talking about Live Mesh, a technology preview announced by Microsoft, with a capacity 10,000 users who signed up for the service in the initial 2 hours that it was available.

Live Mesh is like a central station or desktop in the cloud. you connect all your devices to this desktop in the cloud. One Application is Live Folders, a shared folder across all your machines.
Here’s the audio recording for the last part of the talk. (length = 20:08)
Here are his slides:

Feedsync Presentation (ppt)

FeedSync Presentation (pptx)

I can’t put it any better than Get Satisfaction who offers this type of feedback service as a generic free service for any company to use.

“Get Satisfaction is a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers.”

Get Satisfaction
Dell’s IdeaStorm
IdeaScope
Shoulddothis.com
Starbucks
SharepointPedia

Take a look at these various examples. I think the UW can find lots of value with this new model of openness for its community. An obvious example is giving our students a new voice so they can tell the UW what they think as a strong community.

You can hit me back via comments on this post.