It’s cold and wet in Paris, France, but the participants at Le Web could care less. Over 2,500 people were in attendance for day one of the conference and all were nice and dry, and well fed. Loic and Geraldine Le Meur have done an excellent job planning for this two-day event.
Everywhere you went there were food/beverage stations, great seating areas with tons of outlets and the wi-fi worked (mostly) and so did the heat. I have never attended a classier conference, once again the French have topped anything I have seen produced in the states. Bravo!
Some of the big announcements from day one came from Twitter and MySpace. The four major ones from Twitter came during Ryan Sarver’s presentation. Unfortunately I am not a developer so some of this stuff doesn’t exactly make me jump up and down, but for those of you in know I hear this is pretty exciting stuff.
Twitter Announcements:
1. Firehouse for everyone – they want everyone to have access to the entire Twitter data feed. This means any developer can build rich applications off this data, instead just the lucky few who currently have this access.
2. New developers site – a place for developers to get together and learn, ask questions and share information, including tutorials. Should be launching in the next couple of weeks.
3. Move to OAuth – requests per hour will be increased which they believe will make it easier for 3rd party applications to add more features and increase the engagement that they are able to provide.
4. Chirp – the first Twitter development conference taking place in San Fransisco in 2010. Tickets will be priced under $400 and the venue will hold around 900 people. More details to come at chirp.twitter.com
Mike Jones, COO of MySpace, took the stage and had some news to share as well. MySpace is opening up their massive data feed, something they have never done in the past.
MySpace Announcements:
1. MySpace is opening up their entire data feed to all developers. Much like the Twitter fire hose, this data feed gives unprecedented access to the 35 million daily status updates of MySpace users.
2. New developer site – MySpace is also revamping their developer site to offer better tools and documentation to developers.
3. $50,000 contest – MySpace is offering a prize of $50,000 to one lucky developer who can build the most compelling service off the new MySpace data feed. More information is available on their developer site at http://developer.myspace.com/.
