Open your I’s and pay attention…

London? Yes, London. You know, fish, chips, cup o’ tea.

Congratulations to Carson Systems for their very successful Future of Web Apps (FOWA) London 2007. What more could we ask for. We had good pints, met amazing industry talents from all over the globe, had energized discussions about the future of the online industry and emerging technologies, and even had a sunny day and blue skies in London in February. What more could we hope for from a conference, well maybe wi-fi (sorry Ryan, don’t mean to put salt in the wound

So what was the buzz at this years FOWA London? Two things resonated to me more than anything in the conference. OpenID and attention data. All of the key players from digg to Netvibes, Last.FM to Arrington touched on, commented or made announcements in these arenas.

On day one the buzz term for the conference seemed to be attention data. Last.fm made some very interesting commentaries on the importance of attention data. Simply put attention data is data collected about user activity or inactivity based on what a user gives their attention to. What people pay attention to gives you information, what they ignore tells you just as much. In the case of music, songs that people select provide feedback, so do songs that people ignore but let play. There are many opportunities in web applications to learn from what draws attention, what maintains attention and what loses it.

A good example of the use of attention data can be seen in tag clouds. Simple tag clouds based on key word density can be misleading. For any given topic, heavy repetition or traffic around a term or terms can escalate their popularity and cause them to “grow”. These terms are not always the best or most useful for users, but moderation of tag clouds can be akin to censorship. Now look at the addition of attention data to the mix. How long did users spend on the various articles for a topic? What tags brought users to articles that held attention vs. only creating a short attention view based on curiosity? This information can be used to paint a more accurate picture of keywords that are popular but also yield stronger more effective results for the user.

Kevin Rose was the closing speaker for day one, and did so with his signature humor and enthusiasm and a glass of wine in hand. He too spoke about attention data and its use to help interpret existing usage data to be more relevant and indicative of value. Specifically in reference to digg, Kevin noted that as the community edges closer to 1 million users the need to analyze and understand the data about that community becomes more and more important. This data will allow(and inspire) the creation of new functionalities for digg that will allow its massive community to “play nice” together and derive the maximum benefit from using the site.

Toward the end of his talk Rose sparked applause and supportive cheers from the crowd when he announced that digg will be supporting OpenID for its users. Identity 2.0 and OpenID have been building topics for a while, but this show of support by digg and the energy that it stirred in the crowd definitely marked a significant occurrence at this conference. From that point on the term moved to the top of the buzz list. Conversations could be overheard about the need for OpenID to be widely accepted and the responsibility of the industry pioneers that make up the attendance of the FOWA conferences to show their support for this evolution in web identity and account usability.

Simon Willison’s entire presentation on day two was about the importance of OpenID, its uses and its growing acceptance. He noted the need single signon functionality without having a single source of control. The energy of OpenID continued as Tariq Krim announced that Netvibes will be launching cross platform widget compatibility with a universal widget API allowing the Netvibes modules to be used in Google profiles, Apple desktops, etc, with an open source platform to allow for many more in the near future. This announcement was followed by a very exciting, but almost matter of fact announcement that Netvibes will also be supporting OpenID as well, which was once again responded to by the supportive cheers of industry peers and fans in the crowd.

So what does it all mean you might ask. Well, its time for some refinement. Data collection and analysis for the refinement of rich internet applications is nothing new, but perhaps the type of data we are collecting and what we do with it needs to be. Creating a common thread throughout user experiences and pooling of certain permitted usage data via OpenID could be the answer. Understanding user paths and tastes via cross app data as opposed to simply a snapshot from each separate website will lead to improved understanding of user needs and activities. This aggregate data could very well be the key to the next step of the evolution of web applications. The resulting improvements in ambient findability and intuitive usability could have the potential to introduce new life into the “web 2.0″ bubble, pushing the often speculated burst further and further into the future.