The Social Aggregator

Justin Thorp of Clearspring came to speak about Widgets and how the web is moving away from the “webpage”. He was pretty entertaining… he definitely had the “hip/cool” vibe going and did a lot of namedropping of cool sites. His company has created a widget platform (built in java) called Launchpad that is basically a mashup creator similar to iGoogle. He gave a statistic that 81% of all web users have seen a widget, and that personalization will be more of a demand in the future.

He gave a few examples of sites that he thought were interesting:

• Remember the Milk
  
• tv.winelibrary.com
• Yahoo Pipes
• Clearspring’s Blog

buzzword alert!

Widget – “mini web apps placed inside other web apps.”

Opening Keynote – Day 3

Anthony Franco of effectiveui spoke in general about the future of RIAs.  A main point that he tried to get across was that Ajax isn’t something that should be used just for the sake of using it.  As developers, we need make sure we figure out exactly what the client’s needs are and build our requirements off of that.  Ajax is supposed to be used to create more engaging user experiences – but sometimes can lead to overkill.

I told you, there’s more!

Ok, so it took me a while to continue this blog since things are so busy around here… but I’m going to try to make this a part of my daily routine.  So, continuing on…