Woo, so finally had a chance to blog about FOWA, the last few days have been pretty crazy. FOWA was brilliant, big thanks to all the guys at Carsonified, I'll be there next year for sure!

I spent most of my time in the pretty huge developer hall (see the videos here) where there were some pretty big names like Tim Bray and Blaine Cook, along with loads of other Web 2.0 guys.

I have to say that out of all the talks that impressed the most were Tim Brays "The fear factor" talking mainly about the global financial crisis and what we should expect in the web app world, along with some real plain good advice for web startups.

Francisco Tolmasky (280 North) spoke about Cappuccino and Objective J, that was especially good, giving plenty of techy talk along with some ideology of his own.

Bret Taylor from FriendFeed gave a good talk too, I've not used it much but it sounds like they are doing some really impressive work in the background to give just the interesting results from your friends online activity.

Mark Zuckerbergs interview towards the end of day 2 was a bit of a let down. Mainly a kissing arse session.. but that was to be expected. Mark spoke a lot about the new Facebook Connect platform, not totally outlawing the possibility of using OpenID and OAuth in the future, but he openly said that there platform was better.

While most people there were pretty normal, there a few stereotypical geeks, I thought there might be a riot when a "geek rush" surrounded the stage to get TechCrunch t-shirts, they almost had to batter them away with a stick. I think everyone benefited from having the chance to network with like minded people; there were tons of ideas floating about, not all of them good.

Carsonified hosted a few Dragons Den type sessions on stage, where developers got 60 seconds to pitch there ideas and win prizes, most of the ideas were pretty pants, one caught the attention of the dragons, an online strategy game that seemed to be growing immensely fast. Sounds like that guy is going to get very rich.

The University (read Expo) part of the show was a bit pants, there were a few big names as you'd expect, I think the £2.5k entry price drove all the small guys away.

A great show, everyone that didn't go should definitely go check out the videos on the website.