Great conference. Today’s highlights included:

• Mike Arrington from Techcrunch quickly reviewed companies he likes (e.g., Digg, Zoho), other companies he considers “maybes”, with a shooting chance, like Jobster, Riya, and companies he wonders “what were they thinking?”, like Browzar and Jigsaw. He perceives some common aspects of great companies: they remove friction in extraordinary ways, with a passionate team and great founder dynamics, and they don’t take on excessive financing. (So far so good…)
• Cal Henderson, lead developer at Flickr, had some very interesting stuff to say about Flickr development. Here’s a few: they have only about 6 developers, no QA team, and every developer tests and deploys their own code to production, sometimes several times a week.
• Jeff Veen from Google gave one of the best talks of the entire conference about the elements of effective design: visual design, interaction design, and information architecture. I can’t wait to share some of his ideas with the Grupthink product design team.
• Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, had some timely things to say about the perils of hosting (given Grupthink’s hardware woes today). He devoted a whole slide to the statement (in a giant font) “All hosting sucks”, and explained his mitigating strategy of leasing a lot of the cheapest servers he can find in multiple locations, assuming they “won’t suck all at the same time”.

I also stumbled into sharing lunch with a product manager from Yahoo! Music, and we had a long conversation about Grupthink. I’ll be emailing him for further feedback after our upcoming 1.4 release.

Tomorrow, I head back to Montana. More photos from the event can be accessed here.

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