So could day two be as strong as day one? Well, if the morning was any indication, the answer would be a definite NO. For starters, it was raining. Secondly, I think that the morning panelists may have had a bit too much fun the night before and not enough time to recover, because what I was hearing from a lot of people is that their morning panels were not that good.

The first panel I went to was Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation, which consisted of Christian Crumlish from Yahoo!, Kaliya Hamlin from Identity Woman, Mary Hodder from Dabble, George Kelly from the Contra Costa Newspapers and Ted Nadeau from Dot Line Inc. The title of the panel seemed very intriguing and I thought I could gain a lot out of it and how it applies to social networking. There were a few things I took away, but not necessarily how they directly applied to social networking. Kaliya talked about identity and namespaces, which I thought was good. She illustrates how OpenID like services work she was pitching  explaining the Yadis protocol, which would bring the various OpenID like options into 1 single sign on. Ted discussed reputation (which he knowingly admitted that prior to a few days ago; he did not know much about the subject matter, kinda scary). With that being said, he did make some good points on the matter. He defined what reputation is as it pertains to the web and how you are not the primary authority on your reputation as it appears differently to different people.

The afternoon shaped up to be strong to quite strong, but I don’t have to tell you that (sorry, Meet the Parents reference there). The first afternoon panel I attended was one that was so far out of my role as product manager, but I thought hey, I would like to know more about some of the hot web technologies. It was Ajax or Flash, What is Right for You; and the panelist was Jonathan Boutelle from Slideshare. The main thing I got out of this was that you can develop web apps that use both technologies, and you should, but you should know when to use them and when not to use them. Jonathan said the web is an HTML experience and that you should keep Flash on a leash. He pointed out a few cool AJAX tricks like temporary inline messaging, tabbing within a div layer, and temporarily visually recognizing the change the user just made in the page. The last two things to mention are some interesting uses of Flash. Jonathan suggested using flash to record video straight from your laptop via the built in web cam and upload it directly and do real time person to person video chat. I smell some business opportunities here!

The last panel I will mention was ValleySpeak for the Rest of Us: Developing Apps Outside InternetVille given by Brian Oberkirch of Small Good Thing and Dan Cedarholm of SimpleBits. The main question of the panel was does location (meaning being in the Valley) matter when building a web app? The short answer was not it does not matter, except when it does. Basically, what it comes down to is having the right people on the team, but unfortunately, most of the talent seems to gravitate to the Valley, why? The Valley has the funding, the community and the startup mojo, and a lot of people are drawn to that. In order to combat that, you need to build a great development community, which is the key to your success if you are outside of the Valley.

I also spent some time perusing the trade show floor in between panels. With the exception of a few technology companies (AOL, Google, Firefox, Userplane and Opera), the rest were of the displays were things I was not terribly interested in. One display to note was a company called Lucky Oliver. The name struck me so I thought I would stop to check it out. They are a low cost stock photography site, not sure how I would use them, but I got a free t-shirt from them.

The evenings festivities started off pretty much the same way the morning did, dampened by a lot of rain. That did not stop us for seeking out one of the best TexMex restaurants in all of Austin. We had to drive a few miles outside of downtown, but it was well worth it. The place we went to was Maudie’s, and apparently it is a local chain here in Austin. The food was good, the atmosphere was right and the beer was cold. After dinner, we were off to a place called The Ginger Man, supposedly the best place in Austin to get a beer (at least that’s what some guy told us the night before while we were waiting in line to get into a party). Well, he was right. They had somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 beers on tap, and if you could not find something you like, then you must not like beer. After that, we were off to Austin City Limits where we say a band called VOXTROT play. They were a kind of sub pop like band, not my style of music, but they were entertaining.

Time to head off to day three; I will be back with more tomorrow.