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Next Utah Social Media Developers Garage Meeting: December 11

Posted on November 21, 2007 by jessestay

I mentioned this in the official group, but the next Utah Social Media Developers Garage meeting will be held Tuesday, December 11 at 7pm. Amazon.com’s Jeff Barr will be our featured speaker and will be talking about Social Networking sites that currently use Amazon Web Services and why AWS is beneficial to this medium. I’m excited to have him here and look forward to hearing what he has to say – I appreciate him taking the time to address our group. We will have at least one more guest speaker after Jeff, which will be announced soon – I’ll update that here and on the event page.

After the event we will hope to play some Guitar Hero, Halo 3, or Dance Dance Revolution on the Xbox 360 – bring your GH guitars! As always, the event is bring your own snack, and SNAPlicate will provide drinks for the group.

This event will be sponsored and hosted by 12 Horses and will be held at their new headquarters in Draper, unless there are too many attendees to accommodate. I’ll post a map and directions here and on the event page when that is officially confirmed. The event will also be sponsored by my Social Media development and consulting company, SNAPlicate – we are the ones organizing the event.

Please RSVP on the Facebook event site so we can have a good idea of the number of attendees that will be there – if you don’t have a Facebook account, please comment here and let me know you’re coming. This is critical to us knowing if we’ll have enough space or not. RSVP here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=20803448528

Auto-Follow Those that Follow you on Twitter

Posted on November 14, 2007 by jessestay

On Twitter, it is generally polite to follow those that follow you – they are saying, “you are interesting”, so it is the polite thing to show interest in them as well. I have heard from multiple people, including Scoble and Chris Pirillo that they have requested Twitter do this for them.

Well, I’m proud to announce that I’ve written a script that does just this for you. It’s a simple script, that does just what it says it does – auto-follows those that follow you. To install the script, download this script, unzip it (gunzip), then edit it. You’ll need to specify your Twitter username and password in the specified places, and if you want to blacklist any screen-names you’ll want to add those in as well. Then, add the script to a cron job somewhere, say, in cron.hourly or cron.daily, and it will now auto-follow anyone that follows you on Twitter! If you get any bologna (as I call it – others call it bacon) followers, you can simply add them to your black list in the script and it will ignore them.

If you have any problems installing it or running it, please comment. This script is being released under the GPL, v.1. Again, you can download the script at:

http://www.jessestay.com/auto_follow.pl.gz

I’ll post it to CPAN later as I get time so it can be downloaded there.

UPDATE: you’ll need to have Net::Twitter installed – you can install this by running “perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Net::Twitter'”

UPDATE (11/14/2007): Chris Pirillo has pointed out that it’s hitting an API limit if you have to follow more than 70 users within the same hour. If that is the case, set it to run on cron every hour, and eventually it should catch up. Twitter can also add your username to a white list if this is important to you and contact them. If you are on that white list, it should follow everyone in one swoop.

gPhone Launched on November 5th – I was Right!

Posted on November 5, 2007 by jessestay

Some people didn’t want to believe me, but it appears I was right about the gPhone launching on November 5th. I was not completely right about it being their Social Networking platform. Of course the platform launch of OpenSocial was launched early. It appears the November 5th launch so anticipated by all the blogosphere was, in fact, the gPhone and their new platform, Android.

New Executive Title – “CSO”, or “Chief Social Officer”

Posted on November 5, 2007 by jessestay

I am the CSO, or Chief Social Officer for my new company, SNAPlicate. I have interpreted it to be a mashup of a CTO, with a social twist. I am in charge of ensuring my company stays up on social technologies, has communication and networking with other Social developers, and keeping an overall social direction for the company. As a Social Development and Innovation company, I think companies like SNAPlicate need positions like mine to keep them in a forward-moving direction. I wonder how many other social-related positions will be created from this new wave of platform development.

I guess I should use this opportunity to tell a little about SNAPlicate. We’re a social development and innovations firm, perhaps somewhat similar to RockYou, or Slide that also outsources work for other companies desiring a social direction. I am starting this company with my partner, Allan Young (our COO), and already we have applications such as our Holy Rolls suite of meta-religious apps, the SAC App, the GrandCentral App, and several other apps currently in development I will announce shortly. Several of the apps we have developed have tens of thousands of users on them, and we have consulted and helped architect other applications with millions of users. I’ll be updating snaplicate.com soon with more details, so stay tuned!

Web 3.0 – What is it?

Posted on November 5, 2007 by jessestay

I’ve blogged about this before – for some reason (not that I would have an influence), it still hasn’t stuck. We are officially in Web 3.0. Why do I say this?

I define 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and any major computer change as a change in platforms. Back in the day we saw major platform changes from Unix, Apple II, to the IBM PC and Microsoft Windows. All these were major platform shifts, accepted by the general population. People are stuck in trying to define 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc. as marketing terms surrounding the general consumer, when in fact they aren’t. A 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 release is usually a major architecture change instantiated by the developers, and branded by a marketing or business staff.

So let’s look at Web 2.0. Web 2.0 started making a name for itself at the launch of Gmail, YouTube, Flickr and maybe even sites such as del.icio.us, and Digg. What was special about these sites? They all utilized AJAX, a relatively new platform which allowed developers to create desktop “clients” on top of the previous, 1.0 web platform. Around this same time came Adobe’s Flex, another similar platform which accomplished the same purpose. Add to that Google’s Gears and Adobe’s Air, (and maybe even the soon-to-come Mozilla products), developers now had the capability to provide media-rich, client-side platforms that have the ability to communicate with the web all through a single web browser or web communications platform. This was a major change from the previous web architecture of only being able to shift from page to page to get what you wanted your applications to do on the web.

Over the last year or two, as some of the Web 2.0 applications have released social capabilities – sites such as Classmates (not a platform), LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, and Facebook. Users have embraced many of these sites, and have begun to utilize these sites as their own “personal internet”, allowing them to view what their friends are doing, keep track of relationships, business contacts, and use the internet at a much more personalized level. Some of those have released APIs to the platform controlling the social capabilities within their own architectures. These APIs, such as OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform bring an entirely new level to these social websites, giving access to hundreds of millions of individual internet users. Now, through an entirely open methodology, developers, like never before have access to an entirely new internet, inaccessible before, that brings completely new customers, a much more personalized audience, and a completely new method of application development. Social API, my friends, is Web 3.0.

What will Web 4.0 be? I predict the cell phone market – perhaps through phones such as the iPhone and just announced Android architecture. There are more than a billion cell phones out there, at an even more personalized level than even the social networks can provide!