The 2008 Web 2.0 Conference (and Expo) got off to a raucous start today. This morning I participated in a workshop (emphasis on the "shop") covering Facebook and opensocial application development. While extremely disappointing in its basicity (a word which I am coining to mean "When a group of people watch some girl click around her MySpace profile to show where you can put really neat widgets"), the latter half of the workshop did semi-touch on important concepts concerning how one should develop in this rapidly changing social network application development environment. I wish the entire 3 hours had been spent developing a working application from scratch, though, even if it had just been a dumb "Hello World" app that says "Hello World" to your friends. Then they could've discussed specific issues encountered with working with Facebook and OpenSocial. How you deal with the differing implementations in the OpenSocial containers. The best way to update and maintain your code to work on the various sites. That's stuff I would've liked to learn about. But if anything it provided a few scraps for thought about OpenSocial coding.

In the afternoon I sat in on a pretty interesting talk about "Innovating on Time" (which may or may not be the official title, but close enough). This topic is something I'd like to go more in depth with at a later point when I've had the opportunity to read a little more and collect my thoughts, but the premise that someone or some group should allot time in their schedules for the simple act of idea creation - or "ideating" - is pretty interesting to me. And while this was the primary focus of the first half of the workshop (there was a 15 minute break for snacks which were nowhere to be found...sob), the second half of the workshop focused on the issue of how you act on these ideas in a timely manner. The presenter, Scott Berkun, brought up several key issues and roadblocks we all face when trying to complete a project - be it innovative or not. At one point he started presenting a series of charts and was throwing around "quantities of work-time" and calculus-based derivative explanations of how projects finish in a hyperbolic fashion. It got a little goofy. But the last 10 minutes of wrap-up definitely left some good messages in terms of how one (or, again, one group) should focus on developing innovative products in an efficient and timely manner.

Early-to-late evening after the conference is mostly a vague wash of various scary homeless people harassing me.

In conclusion,

Web 2.0 FTW