We’re on to the third day of Web 2 Expo, and it’s a been a bit hectic. Good hectic, but busy nevertheless.
I got to the show early on Sunday, before things had opened up. Registration was underway.

Our ad in the program looked decent; nice and simple.

I attended a session on web performance put on by Yahoo that was informative and interesting. Anyone who talks about the impact of cookies on performance is my kind of speaker.

Even on a Sunday morning, for a topic this dry, the room was packed.

I went to check out our booth location; not much going on as it was Sunday and the show floor didn’t open until Monday afternoon.

The location was perfect - right along the main corridor, and you couldn’t miss us from the Google booth.

That evening, a bunch of Coradiant employees and customers attended Ignite. This was a series of 20-slide, 5-minute presentations on all things Geeky. Very entertaining; one of the speakers was Justin from justin.tv — a guy who’s basically broadcasting his life, 24/7, as the ultimate in reality TV. We need to organize an Ignite in Montreal at the next Democamp.

Here’s a shot of Justin (on stage) and James Ward (from Adobe) looking at Justin’s website at the same time. I guess we could use this to measure latency, since on the site it looks like he’s just about to walk up the stairs to the stage when in real life he’s already there.

The next morning, I moderated a session with folks from Crescendo, Microsoft Windows Live, Amazon Web Services, and MySQL. The panelists were:

Hooman Beheshti, VP of Technology, Crescendo Networks
Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services
James Hamilton, Architect, Microsoft Windows Live
Zack Urlocker, Executive Vice President, MySQL AB

Decent conversation to a big audience.

(and if you look closely you can see a bunch of our customers in the room too.)

By then, the booth assembly was well underway. I’d cunningly timed my session to avoid all the real work.

Once the floor opened, we were besieged.

The new Web.I product really blew people away. It’s an amazing blend of reporting, visualization, dashboards, and data mining capabilities. One of the things we were showing was a Gapminder-like animation of site traffic showing sites and pages according to their health. It’s fascinating to see how quickly a human can grasp something once it’s displayed intuitively.

It seems that the entire Web2 world has built sites without much thought to performance and user experience — ironically, one of the main reasons for AJAX and Rich Internet Applications is to improve the user’s experience and yet it makes it harder than ever to manage or guarantee.

It also occurs to me (and maybe this is the topic for another post) that Real User Monitoring is the Long Tail approach. While synthetic testing watches the thin wedge of popular sites, most of a site’s hits aren’t to the pages that are tested. That wasn’t true a few years ago, but it’s certainly the case today. As a result, watching user traffic yields far better coverage for the far larger portion of the site that’s unwatched.

As if right on cue, one of our customers built a mash-up with Yahoo Maps and TrueSight user data to visualize activity to their site. Apparently it’s quickly become a favourite site for guests, prospects, and even interview candidates. Great work!

Thursday and Friday is the West Coast user group, too. Wow. So much stuff going on, and so many people starting to plug our User Performance Management technology into their existing business processes.