Cal Henderson is the chief software architect of Flickr and he spoke at the Future of Web Applications conference about Taking Flickr to Gama. Flickr started as a tool for the development of massively multiplayer online game by Ludicorp. As it turned out the game was shelved and photo-sharing tool became Flickr. Ludicrop as a game company was complete failure, but as a photo-sharing platform it was a genius. From Cal’s experience with both failure and success he stated that they started with the things that then already knew and the things that they needed to know. In the case of Ludicorp, the company that developed Flickr, Cal stated that the overlap between what they knew and what they needed to know was just a small bit of HTML.

Cal also advises upstart startups to plan for maintenance. Cal said that no matter how large a site and how many resources available, something will go down. If at all possible provide advance notice of scheduled disturbance. Another suggestion provided by Cal was to try to upgrade, disable, fix a component at a time instead of the whole site. And throughout the process have a clear escalation path. What happens when the system breaks?
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Ted Rheingold started Dogster as a joke and now he is laughing all the way to the bank. At the Future of Web Applications conference in San Francisco Rheingold talked about The State, Future and Business of Passion-Centric Communities. According to Rheingold, a passion-centric community is dedicated to a single particular interest with a single mind, single focus. Passion-centric sites are not something new; sites of this nature have existed via newsgroups, forums going back to the web 1.0. And now passion-centric sites are ajaxified and web two point out. For example Dogster is the MySpace, social network, for dogs, where dogs have journals and their top 8 doggie friends. And just like MySpace, Dogster has in my opinion a very web 1.0 look to it but with some web 2.0 features such as tags and blogs.

Rheingold made a few design suggestions for passion-centric sites like Dogster. He recommended plenty of opt-in/opt-out settings, use of color other that white, obvious sections and labels, plenty of pictures. He admitted that Dogster may look like a design mess, but he stated that people just jump into the content that they are interested in. Rheingold suggested you let your users feel like the site is theirs, because in the end it is their data, their groups, and their social contacts that drive you potential site. Rheingold said that “commenting is community,” sites like MySpace are like “digital doritos.” Rheingold reminded the audience, “You are part of a community.”

Technorati Tags: friendster, dogster, rheingold, passion, social, myspace, community, online, dog friendly, fowa

At the Carson Workshops’ Future of Web Applications conference in San Francisco, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch presented on What’s Next For Web Applications: creating tomorrow’s Flickr. According to Michael, predicting the future of web application is difficult. He stated, “Honestly, the people that are most likely to succeed are probably not in this room, and if they where they wouldn’t listen to me.” After he said those words I didn’t feel like I wanted to be there and listen to him. After making that bold statement he continued on to give some advice on choosing the right platform for you next web application. Michael mention that a top contender for the next killer web application is Adobe’s Apollo. Regarding Apollo Michael stated, “A whole new class of companies can be built around that platform.”

Michael Arrington is not really a technologist; he is more like a web two point duh commentator. And his post game analysis of the big web 2.0 winners and losers are as followings. The big winners (because they were acquired) are writely, skype, newroo, flickr, userplan, myspqce, blogger, bloglines, and grouper. The most likely to win (or become acquired) are zoho, netvibes, digg, facebook, popsugar, stumbleupon, and plentyoffish. The web 2.0 companies to watch out for are jobster, riya, zillow, flock, sharpcast, roketboom, wordpress, second life, and odesk. And according to Arrignton, the god awful “what were they thinking” is made up of squidoo, inform, gather, pubsub, browzar, and jigsaw.
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As a Java developer, every once in a while I need write code that lists all the available fonts or requires the screen dimensions for some calculation. To do this sort of work I often use the java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment class. To get started let me demonstrate how to get an array of all the available fonts.

If you want to work with the available font families you can use the getAvailableFontFamilyNames method.

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