Many of the morning presenters were presenting little web tweaks: tactical improvements to a site that make it just a little bit faster, easier, or have a clearer workflow. Technorati and Flickr both showed the minor improvements that they have made to their sites. These tweaks sound like they were a LOT of work to do. This is a big problem with AJAX: doing it “right” (for all browsers) means taking on a lot of technical complexity.

One of the best demos so far have been, ironically enough, from Kevin Lynch at Macromedia (an AJAX/Flash hybrid application that uses both flash and dynamic html). Here’s a link.
Sabre demoed an incredible AJAX-enabled table that can page through / sort tables holding hundreds of thousands of records). They will be releasing the source for their framework (called RICO) in a week or so. No links so far, I will post once they go live with it.
Right now LukeW (the guy who was behind that neat whitepaper I posted about last month) is talking about how to pick a rich-client technology platform. Read his whitepaper, it’s really good.
Also, keep an eye on ebay. Their AJAX-based “Sell Your Item” form should be live in about 3 weeks at this location. It looks awesome. It has been cut down from 5 pages back to 1. I’ve worked with ebay on the syi form, among other things, and know that it’s as complicated as heck. If they’ve managed to simplify the selling process using AJAX it will be a really big deal.