As the FOWA (Future of Web Apps) conference rolls into London this week, it will be a total gadgets frenzy! Bloggers booed the conference planner when he announced that wi-fi wouldn’t be free. And again when the paid-for connection buckled under the stress of their use – but it’s all to be expected!

This is the second conference and will probably have more information coming out of it, given how much web 2.0 has grown in the last year!

It’s still a place where startups can grown big, and then be bought by Microsoft or Google (YouTube was recently bought for £820.3m by Google). It’s also a place where a startup can grow and then fall on it’s backside and disappear into web obscurity in minutes.

There’s still investment in web 2.0 startups though (which is a change in the tide since the dot com bust) with £307.6m invested last year.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch said, “That’s a lot of money, particularly since most of these start-ups can be created for $100,000 (£51, 268) or $200,000 (£102,537) at most.”

Much of the web 2.0 concept is about “attention data” and putting it to use, collecting information on people – applying an algorithm to it and then modifying the user experience.

Take for example Last.fm, Matthew Ogle’s site collections data from users on what songs they listen to, and equally importantly the ones they don’t, to make new music recommendations. The old style format of this would have required users to enter the music they like – Last.fm does this transparently – allowing more data to be collected with next to no effort.

Flickr (owned by Yahoo) is another example. A photo sharing servive which looks at how many times a photo was commented on, viewed, blogged about, or saved as a favourite – to come up with an “interestingness” factor. But it’s a hard system to beat, meaning all users play nicely! Mr Horowitz (Yahoo VP) said “There was no, ‘come vote for my photo and I’ll vote for your photo,’ there was no spam trying to trick people into going to a photo.”

So it looks like the future of the web will be playing nicely, now theres a thought and concept for the day for you to take away!!