I found this year’s An Event Apart inspirational and informative. There were some presentations that weren’t as strong, but overall I think it was a great experience.

Twitter was heavily represented, as was reflected in two websites built by attendees during the conference. A Feed Apart aggregated all of the Twitter posts marked with #aea09 or containing any other related keywords. A Seat Apart was a work in progress up until the last speaker… we got to see who was Twittering and where they were sitting. Leave it to AEA attendees to whip up something like these last minute.

The main points that I took away were:

• Amazon does it right. Do what they do. (re: UI & design)
• Facebook does it wrong. Don’t do what they do. (re: UI & design)
• Flickr is an amazing place.
• It’s OK that sites looks different in different browsers. N.
• The fold is dead.
• Doing more design work in the browser in the beginning may help with productivity.