This will be my last post direct from the Future of Web Apps as day two draws to a close.

Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, talked this morning about the site’s remarkable growth and its value as a developer platform. He says its user count is growing at 3% per week, which equates to doubling each 6 months or so. Even more impressive are its activity stats – 50 page views per user per day, according to Morin, with 50% of users logging in at least daily.

So what is the Facebook platform? Morin calls it “A standards-based advanced web service which enables you to access the social graph”, where “social graph” means the connections between people. If you build an application on this platform, you can hook into these connections. An attraction for developers is that applications can achieve rapid adoption through the viral networking that Facebook encourages.

For me, his talk was more notable for what it did not say, than for what it did. Morin referred to the oft-repeated Facebook problem, that developers fear their best ideas will simply get built into Facebook itself, but did not offer any comfort beyond bland reassurance. I’m also interested in the implications of Facebook becoming increasingly important as an identity provider. How does it compare to others such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, when measured against the laws of identity developed by Microsoft’s identity architect Kim Cameron, for example?

Joe Walker spoke on Comet, an API for two-way communication with the web browser. Fascinating session, if only for his description of the hacks required to make it work – web browsers are not designed for this. Interesting comment on IE and how it handles data in iFrames – “it’s not wrong, but all the other browsers do it better.”

Tom Coates from Yahoo spoke on FireEagle, the code name for a project which exposes an API for applications that provide location-based services. If you sign up, it uses a variety of techniques to detect your location. An application could then do things like advising the speed limit in your area, or giving you a weather forecast, or informing you of friends nearby, or any number of other possibilities. Intriguing stuff, but with security and privacy implications that have not been fully worked out. It will be interesting to track what happens once people begin to sign up, which will be possible shortly in the form of an early test release.

I mentioned Microsoft’s short presentation yesterday here at the Future of Web Apps conference. The highlight was a single page showing the complete works of Charles Dickens, with every page on view. We then zoomed in to read a page; the performance was great and the type perfectly clear. However I am taking it on trust that it really was all of Dickens works…

The technology behind this is Seadragon, acquired by Microsoft in February this year. I’m told that it will be integrated into Silverlight 1.1, so I guess we will be able to use this cross-platform next year. It is also used in Photosynth.

Is it any different from what you can already do with say Google Maps and related, or Virtual Earth? The answer I guess is that amazing zoom capability is nothing new, but Seadragon looks like an advance in smoothness and probably ease of programming. The goal:

visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.

I’m at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. Ryan Carson is interviewing Om Malik and Mike Arrington about – you guessed – the future of web applications.

Organizers Carson Systems seem to be testing the size of the market for their conference. This one follows another in London earlier this year, at a smaller venue. I suspect it is reaching its limit, though Carson consistently attracts high quality speakers. The conference aims to be an incubator for startups, though it attracts a wider audience than that implies.

As for the debate on stage, it is all pretty inconclusive as you would expect, but I’m interested in how the discussion keeps coming back to web identity issues. “Google pushing its identity mechanism, so is Yahoo, and so on,” says Malik. Carson asks how the problem of multiple identities will be fixed? Malik immediately turns pragmatist.  Developers should “support them all, what do you care? Let them fight it out”.

The conversation turns to Facebook. The participants flail around. Nobody knows how significant Facebook will prove long-term, or how viable Facebook applications are for developers. There is concern that Facebook itself may just copy all the good ideas. Further, Malik is dismissive of what has been done so far. “It is amateur, preliminary stuff,” says Malik. “If it is such as great web OS, where are the smart applications? I haven’t seen any.” Asked where Facebook will be in a year’s time, Arrington says it will go public; Malik says it will be embroiled in legal issues.

Malik is not altogether negative. He sees the real value of Facebook as an identity system. “”One application which shows the potential of Facebook is Free World Dialup [FWD]. Facebook becomes a directory service. That would be my idea of a disruptive application.” FWD integrated VOIP into Facebook.

Has Google been beaten by Facebook? “I don’t think the game is over with regard to social networking,” says Arrington.

What else? I liked Malik’s comment that “You should be building web-apps that are brain-dead simple.” According to him, many web apps “don’t address the principle of fixing someone’s pain point… a lot just do too much and it’s not clear who they are for”.

Malik also noted that European startups have an advantage over the US, though not necessarily Asia. “Europe has a much better broadband infrastructure. You are seeing the next broadband platform. Second, most European startups have the ability to incorporate mobile into their business plans.

Carson touches on mobile development. Is the iPhone a viable development platform? “Why support a platform where the guys who own it don’t want it to be supported?”, says Malik. What about iPhone vs Google Phone? “Google Phone is tackling the emerging markets. iPhone is the upper end of the market.”

One more quote from Malik. “Please stop doing offlice clones. However you might thing Google docs are great, people are not using them.”

Arrington’s big tip is not to spend much money. The beauty of the web is that bright ideas can be tested cheaply.

Technorati tags: fowa, iphone, apple, google, facebook, om malik, mike arrington

Thought-provoking post from Joel Spolsky on web client APIs. He says that whoever has the best AJAX library will be the next Microsoft.

Spolsky dismisses “the p-code/Java model” (which would include Flash and Silverlight 1.1 as well as Java applets):

Sandboxes are penalty boxes; they’re slow and they suck, which is why Java Applets are dead, dead, dead. To build a sandbox you pretty much doom yourself to running at 1/10th the speed of the underlying platform, and you doom yourself to never supporting any of the cool features that show up on one of the platforms but not the others.

I don’t follow his logic here. First, “sandboxes” may be slow compared to true native code, but they are faster than any browser-hosted Javascript, at least until Tamarin comes along. Second, AJAX apps are generally as much or more hobbled than plug-in applets.

I’m not dismissing the idea of compiling to Javascript though. There are interesting projects that do this already. In addition, Spolsky seems to be thinking along the same lines as Microsoft’s Eric Meijer, who told me about the misleadingly-named “LINQ 2.0”. But I think plug-in based apps will be important as well, both as entire applications and as rich components within AJAX apps.

Personally I hope there will not be a “new Microsoft.” I’d like to see diversity based on web standards.