This one day conference was on in London yesterday and by all accounts it was a good conference with lots of Irish in attendance. I had been booked into it and had to cancel :-(
Here are comprehensive notes from the conference from Simon Willison (link here) - a resource worth having for anyone building a web service as there is a wealth of experience behind the observations. A couple of pieces plucked from his notes:
Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us
Features: the features you put in are as important as the ones you leave out. There's no "send a note" in del.icio.us feature because e-mail already exists. I don't add featues that are available elsewhere e.g. messaging
Cal Henderson, Flickr
People didn't necessarily want the features that Flickr was building, even though they needed them. Don't listen to what your users say - they'll tell you what they think they want. If you give them the things they need, you'll end up making them passionate.
Joshua talked about not rebuilding tools that already exist; Flickr's messaging system is a bit stupid.
A couple of the later speakers then go on to cover the technology used to deliver services and get a little bit into the coding side of things.
Picked this up via IT Northwest - again by Fergus Burns.
keith
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