Here at IE we pride ourselves on being up to date with exactly what is happening in the industry. For this reason the last two days have seen members of the web team down at Excel in London attending Europe’s leading conference on web applications, Future of Web Apps 2008.

A packed schedule of talks from some of the biggest names in the web industry including Kevin Rose (Digg), Blaine Cook (formerly of Twitter) and of course Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The conference was all excellent but if I had to name three highlights they would be; the momentous progress Yahoo!’s Developer Network including YUI 3 and Blueprint, a mobile application platform. Facebook is never far from my heart so the demonstration of the new Facebook Connect and hints over the future direction of the whole product have to be on the list. The third has to be what seems to be the new buzzword for 2008, ‘The Cloud’, distributed architecture to run web apps on e.g. Amazon S3 web services. Over the next few days we will be taking these (and more) and dedicating posts to them.

Some of the presentations are available online on the FOWA site.

The conference also made me realise the impact that Twitter is having on the interaction of people across the web; from delegates (including myself!) updating their Twitter feeds every few minutes to new exciting apps which are using the API. Again this topic deserves its own post which will follow.

It wasn’t all work though and we took a short break to compete in an inflatable surfing competition and Guitar Hero on the Wii and Xbox. I was awful at all of these and the surfing finished very badly indeed which can be seen in the following video!