Big Ahha

Thursday morning we took a drive to South Beach since Bar Camp wasn’t starting until 3PM.

We had breakfast on Lincoln St. and then walked to the beach.

While there the young woman in the photo above came up and asked if I would take her picture. I said sure and she asked if I would take another, and another, and another and one more. We basically did a 360 photo shoot of her. I hope they turned out the way she wanted but it was kind of comical at the time.

We headed back over the water to the hotel and decided to grab lunch before heading to Bar Camp. Driving up Biscayne Blvd. we saw Latin Cafe 2000.

I’m glad we did because the food was awesome! So awesome that in the next 36 hours we ate there three times.

We had Cuban Sandwiches, Vaca Frita, the Latin 2000 sandwich, the Miami Sandwich and the best Cuban Coffee I’ve ever tasted.

Friday we left Miami at 6:30p and drove back home.

Over all we were pleased with FOWA Miami 08 and Bar Camp Miami. It was definitely different then what we expected but none the less a good experience.

Cal was the last speaker that Brad and I stayed for at FOWA Miami 08. The Big Ahha team had a long drive home and needed to get on the road.

The basis for Cal’s speech which tied into what many of the presenters kept emphasizing was the need for simplicity in apps that you build. This coupled with the need for an incremental vs. a completionist view in development will allow you to have continuous release and deployment of sites and updates.

Oh and one last thing from Cal - robots are going to take over the world and kill us all.

The older generation of web users today sees the Internet as a cloud that connects everyone. The younger generation sees it as oxygen that is critical to their lives.

The future of web apps is that url’s will be people too.

You must take your app to the people instead of expecting them to come to you.

Emily spoke to us about how she and her business partner bootstrapped www.rememberthemilk.com (task management app) with $0.19 in their bank account. From 2005 until 2007 they offered their service as a free app and only recently have created a “Pro” account for $25 per year. Per Emily in two years they have grown to 500,000 users.

Leah spoke about the need to have API’s for your apps. If Red Bull ever needs another spokesperson it could be Leah. Energy is a great thing for a presenter to possess until it is so much it becomes a distraction. Leah rode that line the whole time on stage. During Q and A one of the audience asked her what she had to drink that morning and her response was “just a lot of water.”

Blaine spoke of project scope creep and recommends a term they use at Twitter - YAGNI - it stands for You Aint Gonna Need It. Don’t add features to your apps until you truly need them in order to maintain simplicity.

Also be sure to use your own service. If you build something that you won’t use it will be difficult to connect with your users and their experiences.

On a side note and a funny one for the audience was that while Blaine was speaking, Twitter went down and he kept getting phone calls while he was on stage. You could physically see the confrontation going on in Blaine’s head as he wanted to answer the phone calls but knew he shouln’t until he was done presenting. After he was finished answering questions from the audience he left the stage and ironically left his phone at the podium.

Matt’s presentation revolved around scalability. Scalability of platforms, business, people and brands. He shared examples from the growth of Wordpress as it evolved from 300K blogs in 2006 to Millions of blogs today.

Kathy Sierra spoke about creating passion for users of your app and the need to speak to their brain and not their mind. Ok that sounds really deep but it is a great point. The brain reacts to emotions created by the experience without it the mind will say “WTF. Why do I want to waste my time doing this?”

FOWA is being held in the Knight Concert Hall in Miami. House music is playing and seats are starting to fill up. The Carsonified team is busy making sure all last minute preps are in place.

So its conference day at FOWA - Future of Web Apps and the Carsonified team led by Ryan Carson from Bath, England.

There is an awesome lineup of speakers including…

Tantek Celik formerly Chief Technologist at Technorati.

Matt Wullenweg from Wordpress.

Blaine Cook from Twitter.

Leah Culver from Pownce.

Kevin Rose from digg.

Kevin Marks from Google.

Cal Henderson from flickr

…and a host of others.