• Heading off to the Utah social media dev garage #
• @newspapergirl yuck! Well you should stay home and rest #
• at the Utah Social Media Dev Garage with @jeffbarr - 28 people here so far! #
• @robertmerrill would you like my seat? #
• @robertmerrill - wait, you’re right in front of me. I thought you were saying you were in the hall #
• @davidlaplante you’re welcome #
• Great Social Media Dev Garage guys! Thanks for coming, and joining in "the Social". Thanks @jeffbarr for such a great presentation. #
• Writing blog entries about last night’s event (anyone have anything they want me to include in the Google Code blog for my guest entry?) #
• @scobleizer congrats and good luck on your next venture! #
• Bebo launches new platform - "100% compatible with Facebook platform", supports OpenSocial too. Nice!: http://snurl.com/1v62f #
• @robertmerrill it was good to have you there! #
• more big news coming up if a deal I’m working on comes through… #
• Google makes first initial commit to shindig, making it possible for new sites to start hosting OpenSocial apps: http://snurl.com/1v66c #
• @biznickman enjoyed your last post on allfacebook. I see you’re coming to terms with my thoughts on LinkedIn being a big announcement #
• just got an email from a recruiter wanting me to take a job, asked how they found me, they answered "We spotted you on Monster back in 2006" #
• Facebook opening up their platform - I agree with @biznickman - this is huge! - http://snurl.com/1v69o #
• The Facebook platform opening is big for existing Facebook developers and those that want to build their network from the ground up. #
• Open Social will still be utilized by other platforms that compete with Facebook though, bringing developers to both worlds. #
• My opinion? Facebook may still be forced into using OpenSocial. #
• @biznickman do you think MySpace or the other big 5 will actually consider using Facebook’s platform to build their platform off of? #
• @robertmerrill I’m referring to the top 5 social networks - http://snurl.com/1v6ar #
• @biznickman you’re right about Bebo. LinkedIn probably won’t, Orkut won’t, MySpace won’t - that leaves a lot of developers using both #
• @biznickman the other option is the competing networks needing to incorporate some of both platforms to compete #
• @biznickman that’s a great point. Google is still way behind on the backend. I hope they would consider both. #
• @biznickman I was wondering the same thing - interesting that both announcements came the same day #
• Google guest post sent off to Google. Now to write on my own blog. Still need to finish last chapter of the book! #
• @utah what was the name of the guy that has the 11111011000.com binary 2008 countdown? #
• Stay N’ Alive’s blog review of last night’s Social Media Dev Garage Mtg: http://snurl.com/1v6li #
• "Facebook Stalkin’" - thanks @jasonalba!: http://tinyurl.com/29g675 #
• @ericlitman we’re just going to miss each other. I’m heading to LA tomorrow. #
• @biznickman good luck on the Social Times event! Wish I was still back in Virginia so I could attend. #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

You’ll notice I’ve started posting all my Twitter updates on a daily basis. The whole Twitter concept came about as a form of “mini-blogging”. It’s a great way to blog as you go throughout the day. Since I don’t always have time to write entire blog posts, I’m posting my Twitter posts, which often include great links I find, new news I come across, and my opinions on news as it is happening. Of course, if you want to get it as it’s happening, follow me on Twitter!

My co-author, Jason Alba pointed out this hilarious acapella number by the group, “Straight No Chaser”. Check it out - they are quite talented, and it should get quite a laugh out of you!:

Utah had it’s very first Social Media Garage meeting as a non-Facebook specific group yesterday, December 11. Phil Burns and I started the Utah Facebook Developers Garage, and at our October meeting, the group agreed to making our name much more generic so we could support technologies such as Open Social. I think the meeting yesterday went better than I could have expected.

Jeff Barr, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, was our featured guest speaker for the night. He spoke on Amazon ECS (E-Commerce Service), S3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Electric Compute Cloud), and SQS (Simple Queue Service). I think it was very educational for all that were there - many there were not aware of what Amazon was doing.

Towards the end he featured Social Media technologies that are currently using AWS. He talked about Paul Allen (the younger)’s We’re Related (a company I consulted for as they were planning the software) and their tremendous success in dealing with 1.8 million users in just 2 months, utilizing AWS, S3 and EC2 to help them with the process. He featured a couple other examples, including iLike, that were also using their services to scale on Facebook.

My favorite feature of the night was Jeff Barr’s demo of how he uses Second Life to help him evangelize, and present AWS to a worldwide audience. He gave one of the coolest demos I’ve seen on how he’s using the second life rendering engine to model the AWS systems in 3D. He clicks on a little Amazon logo in his model, and in animated 3D in Facebook it all runs, demonstrating the process flow in real time right there in Second Life! He says he plans to tie in a real system to this model, feeding real data to display the data in a real environment. He also showed how he has weekly meetings with AWS developers in right in Second Life, and went on to show a presentation he had made in Second Life to a users group half-way around the world!

Jeff Barr, after last night, convinced me that Second Life is here to stay - it’s an invaluable tool that, if used right can be a great method of communication, presentation, and meeting with a worldwide audience. He convinced me that Second Life is even more useful for businesses than it is for the average non-business user using the service! I strongly suggest if you are a business owner, looking at a Second Life strategy to communicate better with customers, lead-gen with customers, and build new business.

After Jeff’s talk, we went over a few more samples of sites using AWS. The Bungee Labs folk demoed some of their services using the service. One guy (trying to remember his name - sorry, I promise I’ll get it!) showed off his site that counts down to 2008 in binary (http://11111011000.com/ is 2008 in binary)! I talked about my Holy Rolls applications (We’re Catholic and We’re Baptist) and how for an application with 4-5 thousand pageviews a day, AWS handles it fine, and I always have the ability to scale if I need to.

When the event was over we all put our names into a Santa Clause hat and drew for 2 Google Water Bottles given to us by Google Code, and some cool Wordpress T-shirts provided by Joseph Scott, from Automattic. We then finished the evening with a great competition (and great singing voices!) of Rock Band on the PS3. It was quite a Social!