Today’s Meet the Makers conference was worth the effort to get up to the City on a Monday morning. The interviews with the people behind large sites — Shiva Shivakumar of Google, and Steve Weinstein of Vicinity — were an excellent contrast in building the data for your site, or integrating several existing databases. Jeff Veen and Paul Whitmore gave friendly, if opposing viewpoints, on transforming/refactoring existing sites. The message I took from the interviews and discussions was:
- Simplify your site/process; and
- Make easier/faster for your users.
Microsoft won the demo of the day with Snax, in which developer Steve Lombard combined the MapPoint web service with a intranet database into a single interactive map pointing to surplus dounuts, pizza and catering across the Redmond campus. You see, Web Services have real applications!
Macromedia demoed something, but we’re NDAed on it. :(
Atomz and CrownPeak demoed their hosted CMS. Atomz’s system did a good job of communicating to users in several roles just what they can do. Both systems deal with link, asset, dependency management.
