Some notes from Web 2.0 Expo NYC

The Web 2.0 Expo was held from September 16th through the 19th at the Javits Convention Center in New York City. The goal of the Expo is to bring together internet professionals to exchange and learn new ideas, and showcase new technology.

After arriving in NYC and getting situated I realized just how big this Expo is. The Javits Convention Center, with its unique glass cube ceiling , emphasized the magnitude of the Expo. I got word that there was over 5,000 people in attendance. (I haven't gotten any official word) In addition, the Interop and Mobile Business Expo were also going on.

In the following I will outline some things that stuck in my brain from the Expo.

Using Web 2.0 at Web 2.0 Expo

I quickly learned that the folks at Web 2.0 Expo were avidly using web 2.0 technology while the expo was going on. I received a card explaining that there was a Facebook group for connecting attendees, a Twitter account for sending real time updates, Crowdvine for scheduling your day, and Sixgroups for connecting everything together with the "Web 2.0 Expo community". This all is something you wouldn't expect at a traditional conference. 

Designing for Community

The first session I attended was Designing for Community, by Josh Porter. He's written a book called Designing for the social web . One of the first points he made was that "community" is not a feature of software. Software does not make communities, people do. I thought about this for a bit, and although this is true, the software is still a pretty important part. You can't support the community without a good base. That base, he says, should support an activity. He used Amazon.com as an example of this. Amazon takes the activity of talking to your friends about a book, and puts it into their review system. This works quite well due to the part of the system that lets the user say if a user book review is helpful or not. This action, coupled with a system that rewards top reviewers, is one of the reasons Amazon sells so many books. 

Design for Signup

Josh also held a session on Design for Signup the next day. There were several things he pointed out that can be used to capture a signup on a community related site. Here are some basic things that can help on the actual sign-up form:

  • Reducing the number of fields that are required to sign up for a site. If a site has too many fields to fill in, this could turn off the user.
  • Use ajax to check fields without going to other pages. For example, check that the username is available inline with the form.
  • Inline help to help clarify fields
  • Clear privacy policy

Josh also discussed techniques for getting users interested in the site:

  • Immediately engage the user
  • Be clear on what the site does
  • Convince people that the site is worth their time. People must be motivated enough to care
  • Allow the user to fill in information, and to save it they must sign-up to the site.

As far as usability Josh also mentioned important aspects of design:

  • Support for auto-filling in forms when an error occurs
  • Copy the signed up username in a confirmation email
  • Support for lost username and password
  • If using CAPTCHA make sure that is it not too hard for the users to read

Overall Josh provided some very good techniques for getting users to sign-up to a social site.

Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a "2.0" World

Avinash Kaushik, web analytics expert and author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day , discussed Analytics in Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a "2.0" World. Avinash was actually pretty funny about the way he described things. He explained that every analytics tool out there is a "dumb data puker", which is absolutely true. You can look at web data and conclude nothing if you are not looking at the data correctly. Web analytics tools tell us the what, but in many cases they are missing the why. The ‘why' is the part that we have to decipher.

Here are a couple more things I noted from his talk:

  • Analyze bounce rates and figure out why your users are leaving. In his own words, "I came, I puked, I left" - Create engaging content to keep those users
  • Look at the amount of pages visited per keyword, take the lowest conversions and figure out why the user is not going on to more pages
  • Pay close attention to conversion rates, which keywords get more conversions, where users are going on the site before they sign-up
  • Quantify the value of the many jobs that your website does.
  • "People rarely come to the website for the purpose you created it. Surprise, surprise." - Figure out what users are actually doing
  • Experiment with A/B test pages - Pick the one that performs better

Enterprise Radar

During Tim O'Reilly 's Keynote, he explained that we should all work on projects that actually make a difference. With an almost political tone, Tim described that there's a big problem that needed to be solved with our disposable culture, and one way it can be solved is by creating applications that ‘instrument the world' and make sense of the information that is gathered. Tim also urged conference goers to Vote, even providing a URL to register.

Best-kept Secrets to Search Engine Optimization Success

On the third day of the expo the session by Stephan Spencer, CEO of Netconcepts , Best-kept Secrets to Search Engine Optimization Success, outlines strategies for improving search engine rankings. In the description it stated that the session was not for the novice. My only complaint about this session was that it wasn't longer. There was a lot of information in a short amount of time.

A couple useful tips that Stephan presented:

  • Redirect %20 (space) at the end of a URL - this will allow search engines to properly assign rank for inbound links that formatted the link incorrectly.
  • How to find the true position of an indented search result in order to capture that position - Deconstructing Grouped Google Results
  • Determine who is linking to you using Yahoo Site Explorer
  • Identify trends in search terms using Google Trends

The Expo Hall

The first thing everyone saw when walking into the expo hall was Microsoft. On display they were showing off Microsoft Surface . Although I didn't get a chance to personally play with the table, I've seen the technology before, and it's quite amazing. Everyone else thought the same as they crowded around to see what it could do. I wouldn't exactly call this "Web 2.0", but okay.

There were many companies presenting their enterprise level services, a lot of them offering a small subset of web 2.0 functionality, whether it be a community platform or social bookmarking. Other companies displayed their scalable hardware solutions, like Rackable systems , that brought their large trailer of racks .

One thing that I immediately noticed missing from the expo hall was big names. Although there were speakers such as Jay Adelson from Digg , and Ojan Vafai from Google's Chrome team, Google and Digg did not have booths; nor did Facebook , or Myspace . In fact, the only social network I saw was Friendster . Where were Telligent and Jelsoft with their community software? Where were Flickr and Webshots with their photo sites? Not even YouTube graced the expo. What a serious disappointment.

Conclusion

Overall the Web 2.0 Expo was very informative. The chance to meet the people actually behind web pages we use every day is very rare in this industry.

The trip itself was exhilarating at times, just because it's NYC and there are so many things going on at once that you're bound to get a headache. One thing I would like to see next year is the presence of more companies I've actually heard of.

I wouldn't mind having more room for charging stations either. Just about everyone had a laptop and just about everyone needed to recharge it. This is a an interesting social behavior I've never seen: people sitting at tables with laptops not talking to each other, but might be reading each others Twitter messages.

Media

Here's some Video and Pics I found from the conference: