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By Admin | May 14, 2008
FOO Camp 06: Plenty of Smart People, Self-Organization, and Web 2.0 Goodness!["Foo]("http://hinchcliffe.org/img/foocamp06eve.png")
I’m finally back home in Washington, DC and fully recovered from the three whirlwind days that made up O’Reilly’s epic FOO Camp 06 over the past weekend. The event was nothing if not spectacular and included real camping, a genuine Google Earth fly-over, lots of opinionated discussion between extremely smart people, flamethrowing robots, and some excellent unconference material of all kinds including — of course — about Web 2.0.
The first evening consisted primarily of getting settled in, having dinner, and general introductions in the big tent on the O’Reilly campus in Sebastopol, California. I met plenty of folks I hadn’t met before including Dale Doughtery, the man who coined the term “Web 2.0″, and who also edits the popular MAKE magazine. Though fun, it wasn’t until the next morning that things really got started.!["FOO]("http://hinchcliffe.org/img/foocamp06dayone.png")
FOO Camp 06 - 1st Day
The day’s sessions began at 10:00AM and I headed off to Timeless Code, a great session put together by D. Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite, and Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Foundation. Attended by David Heinemeier Hansson, Martin Fowler, and many others, the session explored how to make code last the test of time. We explored the fact that some organizations are actively running code that’s decades old and that some organizations, particularly the government, plan for code to last for 30 years and more.
Some folks brought up the intriguing Long Now project to build the Millenium Clock as an example of the types of challenges that it will take in order to make code resist aging including the disintegration of society and the transformation of language itself. Tom Malloy of Adobe observed that Adobe is trying to figure out how to design PDFs to be readable a thousand years into the future. The upshot is that as more Web content on the Web continues to accumulate, making it available to future generations will become a serious challenge. Projects like The Wayback Machine, which makes already it possible to see virtually any Web site through the lens of time, will be essential stewards of our digital past to ensure we don’t ultimately lose most of the rich Internet ecosystem we’re quickly building with user generated content and Web 2.0 concepts.
The next session was a thought provoking romp across the intellectual terrain of innovation and creative thinking given by Scott Berkun (be sure to read his great roll-up of FOO Camp here). Attended by Caterina Fake, Tara Hunt, and a cast of others, Scott sparked conversation and debate across the spectrum. I found this session so fascinating I made a full digital movie of it I’ll make it available in the near future via my del.icio.us links. Scott touched on common misperceptions on innovation and cited plenty of historical examples including Isaac Newton discovering gravity and how Thomas Edison developed the light bulb. Afterwards I cited to Scott some fascinating thinking that John Hagel and John Seely Brown are doing on open innovation and something they call Creation Nets. He promised to look into it for his forthcoming book on innovation which was ostensibly the subject for the session.
At lunch, Google had a plane fly over and re-image the O’Reilly campus for Google Earth. A sizeable crowd of folks all fell back onto the grass each time the plane went by, including for a few passes, Tim O’Reilly himself (in light blue shirt on the flyby picture to the left.)
After lunch I attended a session given by Niall Kennedy and Sam Ruby on Syndication Hacks. It was after a terrific lunch and though I thought it might be a bit of a rough start, I couldn’t have been more mistaken. A great general discussion about RSS and Atom syndication ensued and it was an excellent overview, particular for me, about the specific capabilities of Atom, which has a great REST-based model for the two-way use of a feed, allowing it to be used as a true general purpose Web service for lists of items. Very excellent indeed.
At 2:00PM, Kathy Sierra gave her usually amazing talk on Addictive User Experiences in the biggest room at FOO Camp (I think, anyway), in an auditorium up on the 3rd floor of one of O’Reilly buildings. Right before it began I ran into Om Malik and had a chat with him and I conveyed to him how big a fan I was. In any case, I was struck by how many of the techniques that Kathy talks about are of specific advantage when co-evolving Web 2.0 sites with users. Best quote: “Make the right thing easy, and the wrong thing hard to do.“
After this I went to Gregor Hohpe’s informative session on Out of Control: Working with Ultra Large Websites. Gregor, who I haven’t seen since the SPARK event earlier this year, has done some well-known work with the design patterns of large, highly integrated systems and I was eager to learn more. The discussion ranged around highly multicore systems, custom ruggedized file systems, management methods, monitoring tools, as well as radical decentralization — Web 2.0-style — using techniques like the BitTorrent protocol to scale out instead of up and use other people’s infrastructure to do it. One thing is for sure, the incredible scale of our Web systems is pushing the edge of our abilities in many ways from reliability and scalability to cost effectiveness and design for manageability.!["FOO]("http://hinchcliffe.org/img/foocamp06daytwo.png")
FOO Camp 06 - 2nd Day
The next morning it was my turn to give a session, the subject of which was Applying Web 2.0: Leveraging Network Effects for Fun and Profit. I’ve been writing and speaking a lot lately on a core element of Web 2.0, namely network effects, and I’ve put a good edge on the material I think. It was early on Sunday so the turnout wasn’t what I hoped for but the quality of the crowd more than made up for it including O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest. Specifically, I’ve recently been researching precise ways of designing the invocation of widespread network effects directly into the architecture of a Web application. A key observation here is the understanding that a network effect is specifically caused by the triggering of new, active connections amongst the universe of potential connections on a network.
!["Model]("http://hinchcliffe.org/img/networkeffectsmodel.png")
Interestingly, one implication I’ve uncovered is that a network effect can be either push or pull-based depending on the means used to trigger it. In other words, the entity desiring to deliberately (and sometimes not-so-deliberately) cause a network effect can enable it by pushing people towards the desired site or enabling a pull-mechanism to accomplish the same thing. In my session, I explored the specific techniques (see below for a list) for using push and pull mechanisms for causing new connections to be established and maintained between nodes on a network. Intentional or not, many of these techniques for embracing the power of networks have been used by sites like MySpace and YouTube for a considerable measure of success.
!["Push]("http://hinchcliffe.org/img/pushpullnetworkeffects.png")
I’m still refining this rough list and some of these ways of establishing new connections on the network are still blurry as to whether they are push or pull. But the fact remains that understanding the best ways to explicitly leverage them is key to success on the Web. Given that the most compact definition of Web 2.0 is “networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects” and you can then realize the importance of this topic. Finding optimal, sustainable ways to create and maintain your effect on the network will become a sustainable advantage sooner that we might think, and so will scaling our systems to keep up with our successes.
!["Network]("http://hinchcliffe.org/img/networkeffectpotential.png")
Wrapping Up FOO Camp 06
After my session on network effects, I went to a good session on Web 2.0: Hype vs. Reality where most people in this highly Web-literate crowd seemed to be primarilyin violent agreement about the existence of Web 2.0, though to a lesser extent about its financial implications and future. All in all, it was amazing couple of days and I got to catch up with a great many folks that I know (Bill Scott, John Musser, Michael Arrington, Gabe Rivera, Dave McClure, Scott Guthrie, Chad Fowler, to name a few) and met a lot of new ones that I didn’t. It was very nice to finally meet Paul Graham, who wrote a seminal essay on Web 2.0, as well as Ed Loper (who, like us other tent-free FOO Campers, crashed next to me on the 3rd floor along with a lot of other people that snored at least as much as I), and many others. A big thanks to the O’Reilly folks and Tim O’Reilly for great food, great conversation, and a very laid back time.
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