Mark Anders' Blog

« Macromedia Podcast #1 | Main | Flex Builder 2 Announced »

August 27, 2005

Foo Camp

I attended Foo Camp this past weekend, and it was an incredible experience. For those who don't know about it, it's put on by O'Reilly and is a unique conference, though it's hard to call it a "conference" because it's so different. There is no set agenda; rather what takes place is made up on the spot by the attendees and they lead the sessions.

Foo Camp takes place at O'Reilly's headquarters in Sebastopol, CA which is about 50 miles north of San Francisco. I drove up and the traffic was terrible so it took over 2 hours to get there, but I had Mike Chambers and Rich Kilmer with me so it wasn't so bad. Rich is the founder of the ActionStep project which is an open source component framework for Flash based on OpenStep and written in pure ActionScript 2.0. It's very cool and we spent a lot of time discussing it. In fact, Mike brought along a digital recorder and we recorded the whole thing for an upcoming podcast! Rich did most of the talking and he's incredibly articulate about both ActionStep and Flash as a platform. I was busy driving, or rather inching northward at a snails pace. A number of times during the recording the nav system in my car interrupted Rich with messages such as "in 2/10th's of a mile keep left on US 101". It will be interesting to see if anyone can figure out how fast we were traveling by analyzing the audio clues encoded in the podcast! :-)

At Foo Camp, I went to a number of great sessions on a variety of subjects, some related to software and the internet and others about more diverse things. For example, I attended one on unique materials presented by the guys at Inventables and another on T-Rays which was really fascinating.

Web 2.0

There were a number of sessions around Web 2.0 and I attended a few of them. Tim O'Reilly kicked things off with a great, collaborative session that attempted to define what Web 2.0 is and its essential attributes. At the center of Web 2.0 is viewing the web as a set of services that define a platform on which one can build applications rather than simply as a set of sites that force one into a particular experience. Fundamental to that is the right to reuse data so that new applications can be built. We're seeing this now with mash-ups such as those based on Google maps, but it's much broader than that.

I also attended some interesting sessions on specific Web 2.0 related efforts, such as one on calendaring formats hosted by evdb.com founder Brian Dear, and another by a location focused startup called Platial to preview their site. What was interesting about each of these is that they're focused on a particular type of data that is broadly reusable and brings together both commercial entities and end users to create a data community that is compelling. I think in the future there will be a lot of interesting apps built that combine these and other data sources into compelling user experiences.

Of course, I talked to a lot of people who asked what I do, and while some of had a good understanding of Flash and what can be done with it, many did not. One of the compelling, Web 2.0 type experiences I showed off was Paul Neave's excellent Flash Earth and I think those who saw it were surprised by how rich an interface could be built using Flash. I, in turn, was surprised by how open they were to considering Flash as a UI platform, despite the attempt by some to equate Web 2.0 with AJAX. The key, I think, is in realizing that the core of Web 2.0 is about data and how it can be used and combined with other data, not about a particular technology for building application UI and what we're doing with Flex and Zorn will really help people put together incredibly compelling applications.

Posted by Mark Anders at August 27, 2005 11:16 AM

Comments

Posted by: Niels at August 28, 2005 04:09 AM

Posted by: Mark Anders at August 28, 2005 09:48 AM

Posted by: Danny Patterson at August 28, 2005 10:58 AM