I'd been sitting on Kottke's link for a while and when I finally got around to watching a FOWA presentation by Fred Wilson - VC and principal of Union Square Ventures - I was pleasantly blown away. I was in need of some inspiration, something to take me back to the core of what I like and want to do. Here's what I took out of it, something which I'll be referring back to as I hit my next round of programming, innovating and just plain inventing.

1. Speed
- Speed is more than a feature.
- Power users can have a sympathetic eye, mainstream users probably not.
- Speed is not a feature, it's a requirement.
- Pingdom: When an application is getting bogged down, it doesn't grow as quickly.

2. Instant Utility
- The service needs to be instantly useful.
- No setup.
- No painful configuration.
- Useful right out of the box.
- If you’re building an information service, crawl the web to populate the service.
- Give people something right off the bat.

3. Software is Media
- Users approach software the same way they approach media.
- Media: a magazine, a newspaper or a TV show.
- Voice: have an attitude, and a style. Be unique. Be different.
- Software has to have a personality.
- Software has to have attitude.
- The "Fail Whale" gave Twitter personality. It showed there was attitude and media savvy behind the service. It created a voice.
- Voice is important in a web app.

4. Less is More
- Less is more, particularly early on when you launch.
- You can grow the utility of your service.
- Facebook was simplistic at launch.
- The best thing about Delicious was its simplicity.
- People used Delicious every single day, maybe 5 or 10 times a day.
- You do one little thing, but you do it all the time.
- It’s reinforcing and you get a lot of utility out of it.

5. Make it Programmable
- Make it possible that others can build on top of or connect to or add value to your web application.
- You need an API.
- If it's a read-only API, it might as well be RSS.
- When people can add value to your application, they are adding energy to the application. They bring more users, bring more data and bring more richness.

6. Make it Personal
- You want third-party developers, and users, to infuse your application with their energy.
- Ownership means advocation: turn your users into a marketing force.
- Make your application personal.
- Ownership can pose problems. The community can feel like they own the application.
- The more people care, the more they are ingrained.

7. RESTful
- REST is a software architecture.
- Resources have a URL.
- Everything in the application needs to have a clean and comprehensible URL.
- Make your URLs discoverable.
- Allow for a very deep and open kind of architecture.

8. Discoverabilty
- Understand search engine optimisation. Understand the rules.
- SEO needs to be baked in from the ground up.
- Needs to be discoverable and optimised for social media.
- Needs virality.
- Josh Kopelman: "We Just Need to Add Some Virality".
- Needs to be built from the ground up to be viral.

9. Clean
- Don't be busy on the page.
- White space or dark space: just make sure there's lots of it.
- Big fonts.
- Don't present too much functionality on the one page.
- Make it inviting.
- Be efficient with functionality.

10. Playful
- 6 words to live by: mobile, social, global, playful, intelligent. (Fred Wilson couldn't recall the last word).
- Twitter was invented in a children's slide is in South Park, San Francisco.
- The ability to play in an application is important.
- Weight Watchers is a game. You establish goals, measure, report, and are rewarded.
- Game dynamic. Ultimately, it's a game.
- LinkedIn: Relationships. Twitter: Followers. Facebook: Friends.
- Foursquare used status and badges to empower the development of (what is essentially) a local information service.