I took a break from blogging daily events because continuous partial attention means you’re always missing out on something. There weren’t many panels that were amazing but there were enough that were good or at least had nuggets, that my brain is definitely bigger.

My notes are mostly a list of bullet points, so I thought I’d share the best ones in that same format.

*APIs can offer a company more than just respect from the community. They will of course involve people in your service even if they interact with it on another site. As well they can make your service more attractive and useful and more widely available. (A year ago I wrote and API for Dogster for a cell phone app. I’d love to open it for anyone to use simply to see what mashups would come from it ;)

*Social software will cleave, and situated software will also appear. Instead of being designed for mass populaces, situated software will be designed for dozens of people (all at the same cafe, working on the same math problem, chatting about TIVO on GameBoys.)

*It’s possible we’ll start seeing software made with learning abilities such that though it’s hard outer shell will not change, it’s internal capabilities will based upon it’s usage. (This is almost SciFi, but I expect simple examples to start appearing)

*Software works better the more it knows about a user. Software will start tracking much more about everything you do AND will start running complex algorithms to make complex decisions about your interests. Of course it 10x better if the person enters all this data, but that’s time consuming and storing this attention data as it happens is easy. An easy example is your calendar. It knows all the events you went to, thus has a decent idea of your likely interests, but can also add in what people who went to similar events also do so it can expand it’s offering. (This should be much better than “people who bought this book also bought that book” but real complex data mining on all direct and loose connection will be required to achieve anything meaningful.)

*Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo!’s exceptional creative team gave a good presentation. Dogster met Bradley at the Under The Radar event and I look forward to getting to talk with him more. Their team’s mantra is find, use, share and expand in regards to all human knowledge (aka FUSE). They are very focused on the above point about storing a user’s attention data, comparing it to similar people’s and offering a web experience that is filtered through that lens. Yahoo is big into open APIs and big into not disrupting the magic of teams they acquire or recognize in house. They even had a full-day anyone welcome API hackathon. All disciplines teamed up to see what they could do with all the data available. One team made an amazing bluetooth/cell-phone mapping app that showed you where and your friends were and even allowed for uploading photos of the room you were in so you could go from street view to room view. For some unknown reason they are not going to produce it, though highly encouraged anyone else to. Cool.

[As an extra bonus I have to rant that to for a $1,000 technology conference put on by a technology company, the WiFi was deplorable and worse, in my mind, was that O'Reilly offered zero AV support to each presenter. Speakers had to guess which mike they should use the mike was, talk over 30 minute hisses and guess when their panel was over. I understand organizing conferences is extremely demanding, but it should be for a conference company. The last day the conference rooms we also way too small. Other than that, it was a very good event.]