Dan Hilton

Is the web boring? A silly title perhaps for a web developer Blog but I’m starting to lose the love. Less and less is really making me go wow - perhaps that’s just a sign of getting older and more experience or just perhaps people have stopped doing things for the love and more the money. There is nothing wrong with that, but it does show in the quality of the web app / site. I’ve been thinking a lot about web apps and start-ups recently, business models, revenue streams and such like - looking at various uk and and American start-ups thinking: “Just how did that get funded?” - like an online app for making cartoons or drawing speech bubbles on pictures. How is that going to make money? A premium service were you can host them on their site rather than jsut moving them to the latest free photo hosting service?

I used to read blogs about interesting new sites and cool new ways delivering web experiences - but now those bloggers talk about ranking lists, how Facebook is the new messiah and how many rss subscribers they have. Maybe I’m just reading the wrong blogs, maybe I’m just experiencing the post holiday come-down, I dunno. But I used to be very optimistic about the web and it’s ability to deliver us from some evil or at least drudgery. Now it seems more important to send pictures of cats with comments on them rather than thinking about we can push things forward. In a random clothes shop in Malaga, Spain there was a point of sale sign which simply stated: “The chance of change”, I’m not sure that they meant to evoke anything in particular but it stuck with me. In the internet and the opportunities it affords us for information flow, we have a chance to change. We may lose that chance as slowly it gets comodified and resold as measured, tracked attention stream coupled with the loosely accurate social graph of our online footprint, past, present and future. Or I may be getting old.

Anyway, enough ranting for now - the usual what I think is upcoming and cool:

• Erlang - parallel programming made easier in a functional language, for hardcore web app infrastructure - helped twitter scale and runs a lot of jabber servers.
• Symfony - been working with this now for a while - starting to like it’s bolt togetherness and the structure it brings to projects.
• Jack Pente - http://jackpenate.com/ - saw him live at the Anson rooms at Bristol Union, awesome energy, crazy stage presence and a really good set list. He also twitter’s in a useful way to his site - I’m not sure if that’s done for him or if it comes from him.

I’m going to be blogging about Ming as well, it’s just that if I do it now I’ll get this blog stuck in most swear filters!

I really should have posted this earlier but I just haven’t had time to do this until now. So for all it’s glory, watch me speak about Web 2.0 at the Tachi-Morris centre in Taunton.

The Video (Flash player 7 required) 

If you’re around Bath this Wednesday and find yourself at a loss, why not drop by The Bell on Walcott street at about 7.30pm where a couple of us will be having a geeky pint.

http://upcoming.org/event/160058

It’d be great to see you there!