The Future of Web Apps expo last week (FOWA) started and ended on a religious note.

When I arrived on Thursday morning, I was greeted by hordes of people wearing red MyChurch t-shirts. “Good morning, good morning, good morning,” each of them greeted every new arrival.

At first I thought they might be a start-up at FOWA pulling a marketing stunt. But no, MyChurch, the christian social network, already is a thriving social network with an expo of their own.

Highlights of the FOWA expo itself included Languages don’t scale by Blaine Cook and Joe Stump and Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin’s part of How to survive prosper outside Silicon Valley (fast-forward into the middle for Andy’s part).

The expo ended in the same surreal way it started, except instead of MyChurch, this time it was the cult of Diggnation. The difference was not as obvious as one might have thought.

The expo itself was good fun and the Carsonified team obviously know how to stage these events. Kudos to them.

For a more detailed recap check out Mycycle and for a report from the fringe, the new media whore blog.

This should be pretty interesting.

I’m also going to make sure I catch Soocial’s Stefan Fountain’s talk. He was there in early 2007 as well and won the Industrialist’s award for best theatrics.

Check out the Soocial intro website. “Hassle free” indeed.

Seedcamp … is like Dragon’s Den, but without the bullshit and the TV primadonnas

On jealousy as a motivator during the dot-com recovery, aka web2.0:

People who six months before had been struggling to break even were now starting to get more money from investors and even buyout offers from big media companies. The less Schaden they experienced, the less freude I felt. My jealousy was moving from mild, to strong, to intense to seething.

And on angel investors:

Quite why [they] need to call themselves angels is not entirely clear, but, frankly, if someone is giving you a couple of hundred grand, you’ll call them whatever they want you to. “Who’s your angel?” “You are, you big, generous hunk of money you.”

It’s the antitheses to the “how they made it big” genre popular in start-up literature. As Sarah Lacey puts it:

Anyone who’s seduced by the Web dream, should read my book (duh!) but then read Paul’s book immediately afterwards.

Early 20th century American prints are not something I’ve seen much of before and some of the work on display was quite interesting. One of the movements is called; “Machine aesthetics”. That’s almost as good a name for an art movement as “Brutalism“.

The image on the right is New York, by Louis Lozowick (click on the image for larger version).

Even though you’ve missed the American prints, you can still catch Hadrian: Emprie and conflict, which I highly recommend. If Roman Emporors don’t float your boat however, a visit to the museum is still recommended if only to see the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, the “largest covered square in Europe” designed by Foster and Partners among others.

Other people I met there were from Playfire, Hypernumbers and Timetoast.

The mastermind behind the meetup, Ian Hogarth of Songkick, wrote an article on Techcrunch recently titled Hey, Hackers need friends too! explaining the thinking behind the event.

A vast majority of the people at Hacker meetup #5 were people straight from the trenches, i.e. founders and techies. This was a refreshing angle compared to various other networking events. Kudos to the Songkick folks for the initiative.