For newcomers and industry veterans alike, this fast-paced, informative workshop takes a deep dive into Web 2.0 with detailed coverage of the specific design patterns and business models driving the next generation of the Web. To illuminate the discussion along the way, many examples for Web 2.0 are examined and deconstructed. Designed as a helpful on-ramp to the subject matter and conversations at Web 2.0 Expo, this session provides a "panoramic view" of the concepts, terminology, technologies, and ground rules for building products and services on the Web today.

This workshop will also include at least one hands-on activity to be completed in small groups. Note: This is an accelerated half-day version of Web 2.0 University's Web 2.0 Bootcamp.

Despite the widespread adoption of social applications –- social networking, file sharing, instant messaging, and blogs, to name only the most well-known—creating applications that foster social interaction is hard. It is altogether too easy to approach application development from an information management mindset and miss the greater social context: people interacting to accomplish personal aims, exploring their identity through social groups, and working in online marketplaces.

It is these three contexts—personal, group, and market – that form three complementary and distinct tiers of social applications. Users may opt to use an application for very personal reasons – signing up for a web filing sharing service to transfer a file to a colleague – but they become consistent users, and invite others to use the application, because of the social dimension: how well does the application support the users’ needs for social integration?

Effective social applications bring people into the foreground by making the social dimension intuitive and natural, and integrating information flow into the social. Information architecture must take a back seat to social architecture.

The workshop explores the principles of successful social applications, and presents a Social Architecture approach to model new—or remodel existing—applications. Examples of well-designed and successful social applications—including Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook, and Upcoming.org – are explored in the search for general characteristics and recurring design motifs. A number of badly designed sites are contrasted with “well-socialized” alternatives.

The workshop includes two group activities to explore the application of the approach in small team settings.

Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team has identified 13 best practices for making webpages faster through a series of research studies on Yahoo!'s properties. These guidelines focus on the front-end, for example, why it's bad to use "@import" for including stylesheets and why ETags disable browser caching. These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. We focus on the front-end because that's where 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent. This "80-90% front-end" phenomenon is not isolated to just Yahoo!. It holds true for most web sites, including the ten most-visited U.S. web sites. In any optimization effort it’s critical to profile current performance to identify where the greatest improvement can be made. It’s clear that the place to focus for fast web pages is the front-end:

1. There is more potential for improvement by focusing on the front-end. Making the back-end twice as fast reduces response times by 5-10%, whereas making the front-end twice as fast saves 40-45%.
2. Front-end improvements typically require less time and resources than back-end performance projects.
3. Focusing on front-end improvements has proven to work. Over fifty teams at Yahoo! have reduced their end-user response times by following the best practices described here.

As web applications evolve to contain more functionality and content, these best practices are expected to have an even bigger impact. In this workshop we'll discuss the research projects that provided the basis for several rules, as well as the 13 rules themselves. I'll also demonstrate Yahoo! performance tools developed in Firefox and use them to do a live debugging session to evaluate the performance of popular web sites.

Using live code demonstrations and hands-on examples, this half-day workshop will introduce the basics of the Ruby on Rails framework. Participants will learn the process of creating a Rails application, and will also dive into a working application where they will see the Model/View/Controller architecture in action, and learn some basic Ruby language and Rails development techniques. Topics to include:

• Rails application creation
• The Model/View/Controller architecture
• Ruby language basics
• "Rails-friendly" relational database design
• Form handling in Rails
• Application-based data validation techniques
• AJAX calls

Web 2.0 is people! Find out how new tools like blogging, podcasting, and videoblogging (a.k.a. vlogging) are helping companies communicate with their fans and customers. Learn how to enable your community to talk to each other, and discover the untapped evangelists who may already be cheerleading for your products and services.

This workshop will cover the basic fundamentals of search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). Find out how to generate both free and paid traffic to your web sites, and when one is more effective than the other. Learn techniques for constructing highly visible web sites and content that can be found and crawled easily by all the major search engines. Discover what keywords your competitors are bidding on, and whether they're getting more out of search than you are.

RIAs are client/server apps that run in your browser but with desktop-like capabilities. They give users the benefits of customizable interfaces, instant feedback (no reload), and apparent performance gains (smaller chunks of the page can be generated and loaded faster than the whole page). But they come at significant costs: good old HTML and JavaScript were never really designed to do this. Flash, Java, and desktop programs are viable alternatives, but they also carry performance and usability baggage, like slow load times, loss of layout flexibility, none of the search engine optimization afforded by HTML, and non-standard widgets.

Task-focused UIs emphasize the user's core task and enable non-core tasks to be performed transparently, without losing the main focus. When shopping for houses or CDs, looking at the product listing is core, and logging in or out, putting items in your cart, or emailing friends item descriptions are non-core tasks that should be enabled transparently.

This presentation surveys the landscape of RIAs, discusses pros and cons of available RIA platforms, and delves into the technical issues involved in writing AJAX/DHTML applications and designing task-focused user interfaces with RIA characteristics.

Due to the diverse demands of clients, bosses, engineers, and designers, web application design has reached a new level of frenzy and discord. Kelly Goto can help you refine your application development process and project management to an art form. Learn the behind-the-scenes techniques for rapid prototyping and learn to include iterative usability testing cycles in your project development.

Discover how to verify requirements before you code by employing PDF prototypes and HTML click-throughs. With a collaborative mindset and the proper process in place, your organization's design and engineering teams can work together and launch the "iterative app" successfully.

If you're getting ready to start a Web 2.0 business, or you're looking for startup funding from angels or VCs, this workshop is for you. Learn how to put together and refine a pitch for Web 2.0 investors, and get a crash course on how to get your web startup off the ground. Workshop topics will include financing, recruiting, promoting, and managing all the hats every startup entrepreneur needs to wear.

This workshop will focus on how to move your business onto the latest and greatest Web 2.0 applications, many of which are offered at low or no cost. The workshop will review popular Web 2.0 applications currently provided for email, spreadsheets, wikis, databases, accounting, and other business services. Come learn how to get your business rolling in the world of Web 2.0!

Everyone's doing it -- the poster children for "Web 2.0" are built on top of the LAMP stack. The next generation of web-based applications are built with free tools, with few people understanding the best way to scale these applications out. But patterns emerged very early on -- all of these applications share some common architectural principles that seem to be working. In this brief state-of-the-world, we'll look at the various approaches to scalable internet application architectures and what we can learn from them.