The Web 2.0 Expo early registration is about to end so I wanted to give Radar readers a taste of why they should sign up and a discount code for $100 off (webex07mk35). Here are some of the talks that I am most excited about (and one is so fresh it’s not even on the site).
- Writing Voice Mashups with Mechanical Turks and Maps – Thomas Howe is going to deconstruct his mashup After Hours Doctor Office. The winner of last week’s ETel mashup contest (as determined by popular vote), lets potential patients record their ailments, who then use Mechanical Turk to diagnose the patient (who receive the news via SMS), and the calls are mapped for reporting.
- The Story Behind Facebook’s APIs: From REST to FQL – Members of Facebook‘s platform team are going to discuss how they made the initial decision to be the first large social network to offer an API, what data to show and how they constructed it. The team will also explain what trends they were seeing that triggered them to create FQL (a new SQL-like API to Facebook). I just signed them today and it’s not on the site yet.
Other notable talks and events include a Sunday Ignite session (we’ll have audience voting and the top vote-earners will get to do their presentations again during the keynotes), Web2.Open (a free conference track), Stowe Boyd on Building Social Applications, Brad Neuberg discussing how to bring AJAX apps offline with the Dojo toolkit, James Hamilton on commodity data center design, and Dion Hinchcliffe on making widgets. I’ve only listed technical sessions here, but we also have full tracks on business, design, and marketing; you can see all of the sessions on the Web 2.0 Expo site .
If you want to learn more about the thinking behind the Web 2.0 Expo, Tim O’Reilly, myself, and co-chairs Dave McClure and Jen Pahlka did a short audio piece describing our tracks and the conference. (mp3). We’ve also been posting about the conference on the Web 2.0 Expo blog as have speakers such as Fred von Lohmann of the EFF and Andrew Turner.
Web 2.0 Expo will be held at the Moscone Center from April 15-18. It has content for developers, designers, webops, PMs, marketers, and business development.