Last week Martín and I (Diego) attended the latest edition of the Future of Web Applications conference in Miami. Having been to the one in London last year we thought we couldn’t miss this one.

Martin’s Badge was wrongly labelled as “academic”

FOWA is the conference for Web 2.0 projects, focused on both the entrepreneurial and technical aspects of them. All the latest and most popular web apps are represented in the conference. We heard speakers from companies like:

• Flickr
• Twitter
• Wordpress
• Digg
• Pownce
• Etc.

“But guys… you do online research, what does that have to do with the Internet?” We were absolutely amazed to see nobody from the online research world attending the conference. No wonder, these people are still talking about Second Life. This is exactly what’s wrong with online research, no one seems to know what is exactly going on in the web.

At Livra Panels we think that the key to sustainable panel management and recruitment is the creation of web applications that are fun, entertaining and most importantly useful to our users. And as a bonus, to be able to interview them for research. We discussed a little bit about our vision in this post.

We couldn’t be in a better time to take advantage of this trends. If you look at what’s going on right now on the web you have:

• People wanting to generate their own content
• People wanting to share this content with everybody
• People wanting to connect to each other to really leverage the power of the Internet
• Companies creating tools and applications to make all of the above happen.

The successful applications are the ones who are enabling the above in a fun and/or original way (Flickr, Facebook, Digg, Twitter and so many others).

Panel discussion with people from Digg, Twitter, Flickr, etc.

Now, how is this different to what we need in the online research industry? We want people to express their views, give us their opinions, discuss with others, etc.

Many of the lessons from FOWA can be applied to the online research world, in particular:

• Make everything social.
• Not only listen to your users, but also look at them.
• Be open, by using widgets, APIs, etc.
• Explain people what they can do with your apps and not how they can do it.
• Figure out the pleasure model before the business model.

We are taking all of these into consideration (and others) for the next version of Livra.com (coming soon!).

On a separate note, it was very exciting to see many Latin American projects in FOWA, Popego (beta coming soon) is an example of people who get it. Here’s a very good summary of FOWA at their blog.

The Internet is a great place to be right now