Brian Oberkirch and Tantek Celik set the FOWA agenda

Tantek and Brian welcome everyone to the sho and
explain the principles and ideas behind today.
Simplicity – the people here have succeeded through simplicity.
Brian said that many web apps that we think of standard bearers in the industry actually started off as side projects. Answering simple needs.
The power of leaving things out – wordpress.com is not a social network site, but still hugely popular with a community around it.
Speed – another principle, rapid iterating. Pownce is our case study.
Not resting on laurels – continuing to improve.
Flickr is doing this — but been responsive and honouring their community.
The community is actually regulating and iterating itself – BarCamp is a real version of that. There were 300 people here yesterday. That just wouldn’t have happened 5 years ago.
OAuth – a bunch of small companies getting together who had a real need, and quickly got together to solve this. Then the bigger guys got interested too. Open Social is now using it.
Open is the new black!
Believe in the competitive power of openness. Important to build things that are really open, not playing lip service.
Consumer delighting power of openness.
Tantek – one-upping the openness. There’s a lot of this competitive iteration going on which benefits everybody.
Brian – an exciting prospect for everyone – Plaxo, here today, are hanging their hats on being aggressively open! Using every standard out there.
Openness isn’t jsut about protocols, but creative commons, and terms of service. EG. Digg’s user contributions are placed into the public domain. The ultimate re-use API.
What does it matter? Sets an example and shows that sharing and the community and publishing is as important as technology and protocols.
Something very important for your future web apps.
Optimise for happiness – make sure you’re having a good time building what you’re building, and that your user have a good time using it! Build your business models on that.

And who better than to speak on creating happy, passionate users than Kathy Sierra…