I was thinking about going to the Future of Web Apps conference in London, however my schedule didn’t permit it. Right now I’m a bit sorry I’ve missed it, because the conference has had a fair share of very interesting news and announcements. Here’s a short recap from what I’ve picked up from the people who were actually there.

OpenID skyrockets. The big guns at FOWA (Digg, Netvibes) announced support for OpenID. This is good news, as OpenID is something that’s sorely lacking in today’s world of thousands of startups appearing every year. Read a bit about it here and at the OpenID website.

Netvibes announces cross-platform widgets. This means that the widgets developed for Netvibes will work on Mac OS X, Vista, and other widget-supporting platforms. This will happen in their upcoming release codenamed “Coriander”. You can see some screenshots of how this will work over at TechCrunch. This is a great move from Netvibes, as interoperability and cross-platform applications are always better than isolated apps. It makes Microsoft’s decision to name their widgets “gadgets” even more laughable. On a related note, YourMinis announced that their widgets will be integrated with Adobe’s Apollo, which means they will also work in a desktop environment.

Digg announces a fact checking system. It’s no secret that Digg is one of my favorite news sources, but I also don’t hide the fact that it has greatly deteriorated lately, with more and more sensationalist stories and just plain bad ones floating to the front page. So, it’s great news that Digg plans to introduce a fact-checking system which will hopefully keep the false stories and duplicates off the front page. How will this be implemented remains to be seen.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 10:27 am and is filed under Web, Web 2.0, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.