By some miracle I was awake when this conference began at 8AM (ouch), and I was impressed by the keynote. I am happy I made it to see it, I was thinking of skipping it.

Keynote Speech

The keynote, as I said was pretty good. In it, Google products were highlighted, but the real crowd pleaser was when Android (Google’s mobile phone solution) was used to show Street View and the compass feature was shown. This feature allows the phone user to move the phone around and have Google streetview follow it’s direction. So if you are looking South, the view in Google streetview is looking south as well, and if you turn around and face north, then the view in streetview will look North as well, real time following of the users direction made us geeks break out into spontaneous applause.

Open Social was highlighted as well, and hightlighted well. Some useage numbers were given…

Total reach: 275 Million

Amount of developers: 20,000

App installs 50 million

Impressive numbers for something that hasn’t really even been fully implemented yet

AOL announced that they will have a gadget platform, and that it will be Open Social compatible. This wasn’t too surprising since AOL has been aquiring gadgget platforms for a few months now

Open Social Containers

Here are some items from Open Social containers…

iGoogle-

The new iGoogle is Open Social ready and Kevin Tom of Google put out some info…

-iGoogle usage:  50% USA / 50% out of USA

-Negative comments about gadgets will affect ranking in directory

-The Themes API will be updated shortly

- Canvas views for Open Social gadgets will be live this month

-Full open social compatibility… “this summer”

-There is an iGoogle developer blog

Imeem-

-3rd largest social media site

- Imeem media platform Open Social compatible

- Developers have access to media content (very interesting)

MySpace-

- remote container acces to MySpace data coming soon

- Full text search browser side is live on their site mail (via Google Gears)

Orkut-

- 60 million active users

- “millions” of app installs

- Rollout of Open Social to all users coming soon

AOL-

- My Aol will begin offering gadgets

- Adopting O-Auth

Linkedin-

- will offer home, profile, and canvas views for Open Social Apps

- Average user household income of 140,000 per year

- Will offer monetization to app developers

Netlog-

- Huge European social site

- 35 Million members

-4 billion pageviews a month

- will whitelist apps

- Offers help with localization/ language issues

- Monetization availible via charging “credits” and developer will recieve 65%

Ning-

- Adopting Shindig

- impressive numbers as far as users / social networks go

Google FriendConnect-

- Oauth and Open ID, and Open Social compatible

Yahoo -

-180 billion pageviews a month

- Social apps will be able to query yahoo social data

- Updates and presence data will be made availible (as in.. what a user is doing right now)

- will have canvas view

Here are the slides from the “Meet the containers” Open Social session…

| View | Upload your own

That’s it for now, I will put out more about other sessions soon…

The gadget/widget world is still young, and people are starting to “get it”, there is clearly a future. The core skill set of anyone wanting to be in gadgets is Javascript/Ajax, HTML, and PHP. In addition to those skills, micro design skills and designers able to minimize file sizes are useful as well, but what’s worth looking at beyond the core set of skills?

I see three areas where there seems to be great potential, but are not very widespread yet (even though some are ancient).

1) Canvas

Canvas is a HTML element. It is used most by Apple and the Safari browser of the iPhone. Canvas basically allows you to “script” images. If someone wants to be proficient in a skill that will have massive usefulness to gadgets in the future, I suggest this skill highly, and it is underrepresented, and the need for this skill can only grow. It isn’t rocket science, but it is becoming more important every day.

2) Feeds

Huh? Am I crazy? While “feeds” is a general term, and is supposedly well known, content distribution strategy is lacking experts. Virtually anyone who builds something with feeds (like a gadget) stays with whatever worked for them, and tend to not reach out to learn about other ways to implement and parse feeds. You would be surprised to know that there are not many people who have dedicated their time and effort into “feeds” and content distribution as a specialty, not just the technical ways of parsing, but rather current knowledge of interaction with emerging platforms and techniques.

Gadgets are content distribution.

Feeds are perhaps the most used feature of gadgets and is a skill that someone can realistically conquer. If you have a solid grasp of the technical know how of content distribution, you could become king of an emerging niche skill set. A dedicated person whose stays on top of the ways to spread content via feeds and who lives and breathes to stay current in this skill would be ridiculously useful, but are feed experts underrepresented? hmmm…

Can you name 30 ways to parse a feed? Are you current on ways to implement the Google AJAX Feeds API? Do you know the best way to distribute content with iUI? Can you confidently consult on a feed/gadget project that needs to use resources well because it has twenty thousand feeds and millions of views?

Probably not, but a feed expert would, but I just can’t find many. (btw… the AJAX feed API is about to become very important, I recommend at least a cursory look at it, oh, and the iUI developer Google group only has 29 members… hmmm)

3) Cross platform strategy

I fancy myself as someone who is into this, but there exists plenty of room for anyone who can effectively control the distribution of gadgets across all possible platforms. I think that any gadget that does well in one platform can cross over and do well in another. Have you noticed that each time a platform opens up it is always the same small group of gadgets that blazes the way? (Slide, ILike, etc.) guess what? those people get it. They are just itching to get their gadgets on every possible platform, but they are also something else… in-house. You are not going to find any of them explaining or consulting others on how to effectively go cross platform.

How many gadget strategy experts can you name? While there are a couple names like Niall Kennedy and Ivan Pope that stand out, but how many people actually name 10 or more companies that can handle the creation of enterprise level gadgets? How many know how incredibly simple it is to make your web property into a iPhone application? How many people can tell you how to spread your widget after it is created? How many people can tell you before you spend your budget on a widget it’s chance of success? I can, Niall and Ivan can too.

Can you?

Probably not. The people who dedicate their time to becoming familiar with not just which platforms can display your widgets, but also what methods of promotion work best within each platform, and how to attain large usage and retention via design and functionality are useful people.

I can’t name even 10 people who could be considered widget promotion experts who have a solid knowledge of more than one platform, and I am pretty familiar with the gadget world.

Webslices appears to be a great product but I am not able to give examples or explain it very well, mostly due to a surprisingly tight lipped Microsoft. I am not sure why they wouldn’t want to help developers understand their product more.

I requested an interview via a Microsoft contact, and even though I specifically sent the request to a Microsoft employee at a Microsoft email address, I received a response from Waggener Edstrom, who are apparently representing Microsoft (who is one of their larger clients) in this matter. They said “We aren’t able to provide an interview at this time“.

Weird. I would think they would want to promote their new products.

Gee, I wonder why Microsoft developers tools aren’t taking off like wildfire

In any case, Microsoft has some great products that have enormous potential. Popfly is great and WebSlices has the appearance of being a game changing product, I like it alot, and will try to give some examples of it’s potential soon.

The webslices product and the IE product are thus far causing many errors and doesn’t really appear to be ready for prime time. Even their examples are causing me and some of my product testers computer crashes, and errors.

I would love to speak to someone in Microsoft about this as it is honestly the most interesting and timely thing I have seen Microsoft release. It has a very real potential of competing with Google gadgets (if they actually talk to developers about it).

To learn more about developing Web Slices, go here and download the kit to get you started. I am as excited about Web Slices as I was about Google gadgets, but it is very disappointing to me that I can’t get some info from Microsoft, and I hope that changes.