I spent the last two days at a Carson Workshops summit called The Future of Web Apps, which featured speakers from some of more promising Web 2.0 players and thought leaders. There’s a great write up on the conference at CenterNetworks, which is a good place to get a summary of all of speakers’ presentations.

One of the big takeaways for me is the buzz around translating the best consumer-focused models of Web 2.0 to the enterprise. Web 2.0 is about collaboration, sharing and communities. Enterprise marketing applications have made strides in all of these areas, but today don’t offer the same simplicity or the ability to capture (enterprise) community decision-making in real time.

Kevin Rose presented the story of how he started Digg and grew it to be the phenomenon it is today. This is one of my favorite models and a great example of real-time decisions being made by large numbers of people. He said that all of his marketing has been word of mouth, which goes to show that “listening” can sometimes pay off more than “marketing.” The best part of this session was seeing his response to a question I had been dying to ask him - have you considered posting your product roadmap and allowing users to “digg” and “bury” upcoming product features? I knew what the answer would be and he still let me ask my real question about how he translates user feedback to a product roadmap. To my surprise, it’s just reading a lot of incoming emails from users.

Another presenter who impressed me was Carl Sjogreen, who is the product manager for Google Calendar. He talked about the need to submerse yourself in your client, so you can understand them beyond the features they want in your product. In an increasingly connected world, I couldn’t agree more - we’re innundated with large amounts of information pieces and truly understanding your audience requires good old-fashioned human contact. He gave some examples of the insight that came from this approach. One assumption is that calendars are for busy people. Through discussions with college students, he learned that they’re incredibly busy, but they have regular schedules, so many of them don’t need calendars. He also talked about staying focused on the real competition for this product, the market heavyweight that remains unseated with the most competitive set of features - the paper calendar.

Jeff Veen, the project lead for Google’s Measure Map, gave an inspiring presentation on design, from visualization to information architecture. Turning data into simple images that conveys information and meaning is at the heart of what we do at Biz360. Veen talked about using design to build trust by empowering users to do what they want. We agree that giving clients more control to see information how it best suits them creates a postive user experience.

There were lots of other great presentations on building communities, finding business models that work and why passion is the number one ingredient for success. There were also a lot of other great speakers that I didn’t mention, so I encourage anyone interested to read more at Techmeme and check out the photos on Flickr.