Well, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my expectations for the Digiday:APPS conference. As a programmer, I wrote about the importance of the development environment and did a shout out to open source development.

I was not surprised that most of the discussions were about developing applications for Facebook and iPhone. They are the most popular platforms, and they aren’t particularly Open Source. At times, speakers mentioned that there were other platforms and a few people did shout outs to open source development. Yet what was most interesting were the discussions about data and various applications.

Starting off the conference with a data discussion was Melinda Gipson of DM2PRO talking about the results of a survey they had done of publishers and advertisers about using applications. Applications as an advertising mechanism is still in its infancy and this was reflected by some of the results. Many publishers experimented with applications out of a need to learn and stay ahead of the curve. One of the most interesting results of the survey was that marketers care more about the affinity of the audience than the scale of the platform.

Ending the conference was another data discussion. Teaque Lenahan, an Associate Partner, at Gravitytank presented the results of some of their research. He spoke about combining ethnography, market research, business strategy and design into their work. He showed a clip of some of the people that they had spoken with, including a principal talking about giving kids iPhones instead of text books. He broke iPhone users into different groups based on their usage patterns and explored the characteristics of each group. The presentation was full of great information and I encourage people to contact Gravitytank for the details.

In between these two sessions were various panels beating around many of the same old questions from various marketing and gaming conferences I’ve attended. What was most interesting were some of the presentations about various applications.

Mike Germano, President and Creative Director of Carrot Creative spoke about his work on Major League Baseball’s fan application on Facebook. I haven’t followed baseball closely since probably the big strike back in the nineties, but as a kid, I was fascinated by baseball statistics and Carrot Creative has come up with a great application that ties together the social aspects of Facebook applications with the love of statistics of so many baseball fans. How often does your team win when you go see them play in the stadium? How many homeruns get hit when you are in the ballpark? Which of your fans have the best win-loss percentage or have seen the most homeruns? Perhaps these are people you should invite to join you at the next game.

He was followed by Sarah Hofstetter, Vice President of Emerging Media and Client Strategy at 360i. She spoke about using LivingSocial’s PickFive application, tied together with video clips to promote National Geographic Channel’s show Hooked, the most amazing catches of scary monster fish. The particular application didn’t really capture my attention, but it seems like this could be used very nicely in a political campaign. What are your top five issues in a political campaign? Depending on which issues you select, you see a video of the candidate addressing those issues.

Tim O'Shaughnessy, the CEO and Co-founder of LivingSocial had presented the first keynote so the audience was already acquainted with the PickFive application, as well as Mr. O’Shaughnessy’s thoughts about different types of applications, how to acquire and keep users, and his predictions about the future of applications.

Prior to Mr. Germano’s discussion about the Major League Baseball application, Lisa Marino, VP of Sales for RockYou spoke about the "Dawn Saves Wildlife campaign". She talked about causes being very effective in getting an application to go viral and talked about incorporating video, which is another aspect of the most successful viral campaigns. The campaign raises interesting questions. How do you feel about a brand trying to acquire customer loyalty through the use of causes? Ben and Jerry’s has always done a good job of this and for them it seems quite credible, but other brands can suffer from this. Whole Foods seems to have suffered recently when the words of their CEO clashed with the perceived brand values of many of their customers.

Another presentation of an interesting application was Dogbook and Catbook, presented by Geoffrey B. Roche who co-founded the group that built the application. It was a good presentation, and I need to consider listing our pets there. What I’m even more interested in is if there is some way that Dogbook and Catbook can be used to help with animal rescue efforts.

Beyond the data and the applications presented, one of the most interesting parts, at least to an old coder like myself was the discussion about the wider issues about application development. Jason Calacanis, CEO, Mahalo provided the real fire for the discussion attacking Apple’s lack of openness, particularly around the AppStore. It generated a lot of good discussion on the Twitter backchannel. More importantly, Michael Nicklas, CEO of SocialSmart presented valuable information about how to deal with closed application environments. He spoke extensively about OpenSocial. While OpenSocial has not gotten the same sort of traction in the United States as Facebook Connect has, there are 700 million users of OpenSocial enabled platforms worldwide.

The tool I found most interesting was Mr. Nicklas mention of Shindig, an OpenSocial container for Apache. Digging around, I found a Shindig to Drupal connector and I hope to find more time to explore Shindig and OpenSocial. It is also worth pondering the potential future relationship between OpenSocial and Android.

I was pleased to hear presentations of interesting numbers, interesting applications, and discussions of where open development fits into the future of apps. It will be interesting to see where applications go from here.

(Originally published at Digiday:DAILY.)