So what did I learn from two days at the Future of Web Apps, large chunks of which I blogged here at the time whilst Malcolm twittered? Here goes with some concluding thoughts and observations;

Community, community, community.

We’re all creators now… if we want to be. How many of us want to be, and what is the likely split between time I want to spend creating, and time I want to spend more passively, consuming?

Most users don’t care about benefiting the community; they keep del.icio.us bookmarks for themselves, they scrobble their own music so they can track what they are listening to, etc. If the community also benefits with no additional effort on their part then that’s fine; and they’re happy to consume the efforts of others, of course.

BBC journalists were there.

Any suggestion that the UK development scene is lagging behind the (Californian) curve is woefully misinformed. There’s plenty of good stuff here, too.

OpenID is going to be big (I’ve been letting sxipper handle mine for a while, but do share some of a colleague’s reservations around getting too excited about yet another in a long line of ‘solutions’ to this problem).

On the web, product differentiation often owes more to a compelling (and quirky?) back story than to your product being better/cheaper than the competition. The moo guys described this well, as did others, and reminded me that I really need to get some more pictures into Flickr so that I can try their service.

Creating a site and calling it a community is easy. Nurturing a self-sustaining space that its participants will recognise and value as one is an awful lot harder, but Tara Hunt at the Citizen Agency had some great messages about how to do it, and I’ll be asking her to tell us more in a podcast.

Most of the popular consumer-facing web sites do one thing, do it very well, and can describe it in very few words.

The blogosphere looks like this.

For a revolutionary Platform to succeed, it needs to nurture an ecosystem. Open sourcing parts of the Platform seems a popular tactic at the moment…

WebMail is more popular than search.

Find ways to ‘reward’ members of a community.

Keep initial switching costs low – or nonexistent.

Use commodity hardware and software where feasible, and scale with growth rather than ahead of it.

Value is shifting. Or, as Werner Vogels put it, “compete on ideas, not resources”. Another one to invite to do a podcast, I think!

There is a real need to be able to expose and interact with complex data out in the cloud, drawn from disparate data stores. That’s lucky then, isn’t it?

Carson Systems lay on good events.

Not having free wifi at a tech event is likely to annoy the audience, whatever the reasons…

I get twitchy with nothing but coffee to drink all day.

Every trip to London reminds me why I’m so happy not to live there.

I have a lot to think about…

Assorted odd things about my colleagues that probably don’t bear repeating in polite company.

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