Starting Twitter Meetup in the valley and seeding them worldwide

I have always been fascinated by the bottom up innovation from barcamps and meetups.

I enjoy the facebook ecosystem thanks to The Bay Area Facebook Meetup . Our mailing list guides me on what is hot in facebook and extension into the world of iphone apps, opensocial and now twitter apps. Fellow facebook garage organizers worldwide connect with me and I invite them on local visits or share live event videos.

I want your advice, suggestions on what will work best to create twitter meetups worldwide and facilitate interaction amongst twitter developers across them.

First I am starting a twitter meetup in the valley

I have started a new twitter meetup in the valley here. Its a place for developers to demo their cool twitter apps and come together to hear from the experts on what makes a success twitter app and keep up with the changes in the twitter app world.

I want to seed Twitter Meetups Across the world

Twitter apps do not reside on twitter, and as twitter Api lead Alex Payne put it "twitter operates on the edge of other networks". So its all the more reason for us to get together and learn how to build twitter apps that integrate into all other app ecosystems.

I am humbled by the fact that innovation happens one mind at a time all around the world. So I want to tap into the learning of twitter app developers in various pockets of creativity worldwide across the US, across the world in different time zones.

The marketer in me warns me that I have to understand twitter app developers and twitter app organizers as they evolve, but here are worldwide developer meetups/camps by different friends of mine that I hope to learn, emulate and draw inspiration from!

IphoneDevCamp started in the BarCamp model by Dom Sagella (@dom) and @RavenMe. They host annual iphone developers camp in the valley and have inspired 20+ satellite camps nationally and internationally with their own original events happening at the same time worldwide.

PreDevCamp is the newest in the world of Dev Camps, started by Dan Rumney, Greg Stevenson and Lisa Brewster (@whurley @giovanni and @dancrumb ) following on the IphoneDevCamp model to create many local developer camp events.

Drupal Meetup Worldwide organized by Robert Douglass is on meetup organized by a central group with organizers all around the country.

Social Media Club was started by @ChrisHeuer and @Kristie's Wells with a membership driven model with chapters worldwide. I worked with Chris on the barcamp event of Dave McClure's Graphic Social Pattern (GSP) conference in 07. I am not planning for a centralized or membership dues driven group. But lots to learn here on the motivation, inspiration and hardwork from Chris and Kristie.

DevNest (UK) by Jon Markell has twitter developer events in UK and has been an inspiration to me.

There are several CodeCamps, BarCamps, Cocoa Camps worldwide, they are annual events and not ongoing monthly meetups I aspire for!

I want to hear from you if you want to start a local twitter meetup, do you want to volunteer in this endeavor with me? Ping me @sujamthe on twitter.

Share a tweet with @sujamthe on what makes a good app #140tc

That was the call by Tweetie developer Loren Brichter that got twitterville to speak up to make Apple approve tweetie's new version. Loren is joining Dom Sagolla, who helped build twitter and makes awesome iphone apps and Britt Selvitelle of Twitter for a panel on "What makes a good app" tomorrow May 26th at 11.30am at the Twitter Conference 140tc in the Computer History Museum.

Need I say I am super excited to moderate this panel!!!

Do you have questions for this panel? What do you think works , what doesn't?

Here's my thoughts on this topic, read on and go ahead and send me a tweet, hashtag it with #140tc and #Twitapps or call me out @sujamthe !!!

I have seen the Facebook developer developer ecosystem build up since F8 Platform launch in July 07. After several meetups, hackathons and several repeat attempt by developers the secret is out. A good Facebook app is about fun apps that tap into 15 viral channels inside Facebook and build good metrics to track what works and adapt quickly to the users.

Twitter Apps are Unique so what makes a good twitter app is Unique:

Twitterville has a unique community engagement model which helps the viral adoption of twitter applications.

Twitter Apps do not reside on twitter. They connect to twitter using twitter API or twitter search API and reside on different web domains, mobile devices and sometimes float virtually connected by the viral feed on twitter aka a tweet.

Twitter API Platform is bubbling with energy. I see 50 new threads of developer discussions daily in the twitter forums. I see 10 new apps going live daily (there must be many more).

There are apps will millions of users - twitpic gets million users, twitstock raised $800K funding,

What makes an app good?

I would define it as initial adoption and engaging users to scale successfully.
Do you have any other definitions for a good app?

These different types of twitter apps sure gets our initial attention:
1. Twitterville never tires of new twitter clients:
We see twitter clients for diifferent mediums with competing functionality to support enterprise (multi user profiles), stats, access from multiple devices e.g. tweetdeck, tweetie, twirl, twitroid, twitterberry, hootsuite, cotweets
2. Apps adding functionality to keep twitter simple
Photo on twitter - twitpic, tweetphoto for photo sharing, bubbletweets with videos on twitter,
3. Innovative and simple to use goes with basic twitter
twitpay, tipjoy, stockpic, twitcal
4. Churning twitter data
twitgrid, twitfall, twitanalyzer

How do you scale the apps? On Twitter? Mobile Apps? Twitter Apps on Different Platforms?

1. What are viral hooks you can build into your app from the twitter api?
Via appname is one, what else is there?
2. Engaging community of users to drive your future functionality, how has it helped you?
Tweetie is a classic example of this. "user-driven evolution is mandatory for any product that works ontop of Twitter, much like Twitter itself says Loren Brichter of Tweetie. Tweetphoto got 5000 new users on Day1 with some creative launch strategy.
4. How much metrics and tracking do you have built in to see what functionality works for your users?
5. How is it different to build a good app on iphone vs twitter?
6. What is unique when you connect two platforms? e.g my app tmeet on iphone, or tweetpo.st app on facebook



Look forward to the conversation on Twitter and to taking it to the 140tc conference.

TechPolicy Summit brought geeks and policy gurus for amazing discussions in silicon valley

TechPolicy Summit started with TheFreeSummit on Monday May 11th followed by two days of in depth discussions at The TechPolicy Summit.

I was lucky to attend couple sessions. I went in ignorant about the need for geek entrepreneur's participation in tech policy and walked out with lots to ponder about.

Day 1: FreeSummit 6.45pm: @KaraSwisher Interview of Chris Kelly (@ck4ag), Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook and CA Attorney General Candidate.


Summary:

• Chris Kelly brings his experience from addressing privacy concerns for 200Mil users to become the potential attorney general of California.
• Karawisher, the master moderator navigated questions to bring out a very interesting discussion. Panel video part 1 , Panel video part 2 Panel video part 3
  

Audience were amazingly well prepared for Q&A and added to the discussion well.

Day 3: Govt Transparency Panel with @TimOReilly, @Craignewmark, @Carlmalamud of Public.Resourc.org, Ellen Miller, Bill Schrier moderated by Andrew Rasiej, Co-founder, Personal Democracy Forum

I loved this panel!!! Now I understand that the place of @TechPolicy Summit in the valley is to wake up tech entrepreneurs to the opportunities waiting for them with Gov data. The organizers had the right mix of experts and the panelists discussed openly to build upon each others point to bring out nuggets of wisdom.

Tim O'Reilly talks about his vision for identities and tech policy.


There was lot of discussion about opening up Govt data and what are the hurdles today in creating that transparency.

Carl's 8 Principles for how govt data should be made available.

1. Data has to be complete
2. Primary data should be available.
3. Should be timely
4. Should be Accessible
5. Should be Machine Processable e.g. check Recovery.gov
6. Should be non-discriminatory
7. Should be non-proprietary
8. Should be license free

How do we get tech entrepreneurs to get involved in working with Govt:
Tim O'Reilly said there is more data collected by govt than exploited. We don't have to persuade the private sector. We just have to figure out what govt can do to enable private sector. e.g. we get financial data, weather data. Amazing entrepreneurial opportunity here to build businesses if more data is opened up.

CraigNewmark said it benefits us all if we have a govt that works. He gave an example of his vision of how citizens can participate. We could use our smartphone, take a picture of a pothole and send to govt and get it fixed quickly. There is a startup idea waiting to happen!

Washington's clay layer of resistance to change and the panel's recommendation to make it work for all of us:
Ellen Miller of Sunlight Foundation brought lot of stats from real life projects working in Washington.

Inspired by the Apps for Democracy by DC CTO, Sunlight Foundation did 'Apps for America' and got 45 remarkable applications developed. They built a community on sunlighlabs.com to begin a conversation about how technologists could engage with data that govt was setting free. They quickly followed this with a wiki. Now state/city legislative info is being scrapped by volunteer technologists and 35 has been completed so far.

She quoted Rep Mike Honda as the Member of Congress who is an innovator who enabled availability of bulk legislative data. She said otherwise there is generally a culture of resistance.

Tim O'Reilly brought some hope by the term"clay layer". He said people at the top and people at the bottom want change and are stuck by the clay layer, the middle layer of people in Govt. who oppose change.

Craig Newmark offered a solution to permeate the clay layer. He said very emphatically that people want to be part of something big that works, so keep showing it works. If people outside of govt stand for people inside the govt, they will be part of something bigger and will feel motivated to create change and build transparency.

Thanks to @techpolicy organizers and staff for the awesom show and for Debbie and Ellen for getting me Veggie food!

Dear Twitter, we are your community, please talk to us

Dear Twitter,

First, it is not a small change to remove @reply setting which is the life blood of twitter, accessing real people in real time.

@Reply is part of the real person connection which facebook or any other social network does not have.

We use @reply not just to do a quick IM with people we know but the discovery you mentioned in your blog.

We actually recommend new friends subtly to our existing friends by having an @reply conversation with them.
It helps discovery in two ways:

1. We get curious about the stranger in the @reply because of the credibility or conversation topic going on.

One example is I saw a friend inquire @PanerabreadCo and tracked back to find the friends' friend had found a screw in her coffee cup at a Panera Bread. It made me chat with that new friend to find out which location and engage in a conversation.

2. The content of the topic sometimes leads to discovery.

I would compare this to going into a crowded party and discovering our friend chatting with a friend not-yet known to us and getting interested in knowing the new friend from the fragment of their conversation.

Twitter works because it brings our real selves and lets us be.

@stephendann nicely puts it. "A half conversation is just a friend you haven’t yet"

I hope there is some new finding from our usage pattern that drove twitter to make this drastic change. I am curious to learn what it is.

I have two requests for you:

1. I request you to make @reply to a friend's friend or strangers an advanced option instead of turning it off.
2. Please hire a marketing communications person to help plan your customer and developer communications so you engage with us and tell us what you plan to do and why and continue to do what is in your best interest to grow, scale and keep twitter alive.

That way your community will guide you with real data beyond just the reports you see of our usage pattern because numbers can be interpreted in many different ways and we as your community will engage and find ways to help you grow in our mutual interest.

If (I am speculating here), this change is driven by the newbies who came to twitter from @Oprah, we can help them get comfortable with twitter and come up to speed by coming together with a wiki or some way to build an education tweet channel for them. I am sure twitterville will have many more ideas for all your concerns. All you have to do is ask!

To continued conversations!
Best,
@sujamthe

Facebook has set the gold standard for developer engagement with feedback center

Developers Lead on Facebook Platform Engagement

Tyler Ballance as an early developer had created a Bugs App to track bugs and feature request for facebook and other developer apps in mid 2007 and facebook took over with their Bugzilla app to let developers openly share feature requests.

Facebook Platform has been a living breathing thing growing with new apis every day with a loyal following of developers with 600K apps and close to 200 meetups/garages worldwide. Facebook Platform's strength is that facebook truly listens to developers (not necessarily agree to everything) and let developers lead the growth of their platform. They have wikis, Forums and a Platform Page to engage with developers on a daily basis.

Open Feedback Center - A new gold standard for developer engagement

Now, Facebook has adapted a new level of transparency by Opening a Feedback Center.

This allows for developers to submit feedback on the developer related documentation and rest of the community to vote on it. It is an important step towards openness and not being afraid to listen. This is focused on documentation only so they have made their survey a monthly feature.

As facebook opens new apis, one common caveat developers face is that they get excited by a reference implementation, or from a blog post about the new api only to find that the api is not available in their preferred language of choice. I remember developers excited by status.get didn't find the Javascript version and went about to build their own wrapper.

So this is a great start for facebook to understand what developers truly want, the voting justifying the volume of developers asking particular support.

What caught my eye the first time I clicked on the Opening a Feedback Center was that Facebok chose UserVoice to provide this capability and allows user's to login using facebook, twitter, Google, Yahoo, OpenID or MyspaceID before it is mapped into a new UserVoice account. It is amazing that Facebook is truly open here.

It seems fitting in this era of social media to come from the leader in the social platform space.

When you look at Earth from Mars in 2400

update: I had this sitting in draft, its worth a read even if late!

I spent a fascinating evening on Apr 7th, listening to Esther Dyson talk to a room full of well fed hungry minds at the CIO meetup, organized by Tatanya Kanzaveli who brings her unique touch to her events in the valley. CIOTech's official blog post is here.

I was supposed to have met Esther in 1999 when my investor of my first startup Coola said, "you are sitting on a big idea, go find Esther Dyson in NY or Chris Shipley in CA". Chris replied to my email and I launched Coola at DEMO and am lucky for @cshipley's friendship and for Demo Conference to set the bar high about launch for me.

I went to finally meet Esther and got my answer, she had taken her vacation in 1999 after 20 years right when I tried reaching her in 1999!!!

Esther is an amazing person so full of intellectual warmth and passion for all the topics she covered. My attempt to capture the mesmerizing evening is here. It was a free Q&A style event and I have 15 video clips of each q&a here (low sound quality because of my iphone and good video quality because of Qik) See official video of the full event below:



Social media

• Social Media has been a latent urge like our biological urge to spread our presence all over the web at all times. eg. news feeds show your picture you posted to friends even while you sleep
• Search is God's gift to marketers. Social media is about listening without imposing their message which marketers are still learning.
  
• Sponsorship is the right opportunity in social
• Its amazing how people endorse a brand using social media, that means marketers get to hear good and bad.
  

Space

• Amazing stuff. She wants to goto Mars ofcourse.
• Lot of discussion about space travel, her experience training to goto space and dreams for earth to colonize Mars.
• Fascinating views on how we should make a controlled test environment on mars and come back and reclaim earth as there are too many vested interests that won't allow us to do the right thing to save earth for all of our species today.
  

Opening up healthcare data

• Esther is passionate about this and has some investments in this space.
• Lot of discussion about disintermediating healthcare as a business by getting healthcare data online.
  

Russia

• Esther is from Russia and shared stories of her investment fund and her views on Russia as an entrepreneurial bed and how it was transparent about its opaqueness.
  

Platform Play and my plan for Web2.0 Expo 2009

I gave a presentation at P-Camp at Yahoo called Platform Play on Mar 14th 2009. The talk was about how the trend today is for all technologies to extend into platforms with developer APIs to tap into the innovation of developers. We shared best practice involved in extending a product into the Cloud (Web), Mobile and Social.

It was targeted at Product Managers and Program Manager and we had a lot of interaction with excellent audience. I presented how to add Social to your product, my friend Ed Maier of AOL Dev Network presented AOL's experience of opening up into the web and John Lin, an excellent PM ex-Adobe, presented how to scale into mobile with APIs. Thanks to attendee Srinivas who captured an excellent summary.

Platform Play Web Social And Mobile For P Camp09

Web2Open at Web2.0 coming up Wed Apr 1 and Thur Apr 2nd:
Web2.0 Expo starts tomorrow in San Francisco and has a Barcamp event called Web2Open on Wed and Thurs. I am thinking of participating and want to do a session.

Please let me know if you have ideas on what I should present or will there be interest if I repeat this topic of extending your product to social.

Tweetdeck bridges twitter and facebook, yay!

My facebook love: I love facebook for what it offers me, my real social graph, way to connect to friends with privacy controls, power of tagging and now extending facebook via Connect to the web. But the most important attraction has been the energy of entrepreneurs as they build new apps on the facebook platform and how the platform adapts to the needs of the users by opening up organically.

My twitter love: Twitter on the other hand is different as a platform as its totally open, the functionality of posting tweets is open and the data of twitter is available via twitter search api. On facebook, you can execute apps in the facebook as a platform. Wheresas with twitter can access twitter and build your own app to execute on the web, desktop and mobile. This is the magic if amazing creativity in twitter apps, which enhances twitter usage and is spreading it everywhere.

Tweetdeck is this new shirpy bird on my desktop that brings new tweets organized in groups and makes twitter very usable.



I love tweetdeck, twitter is not the same without tweetdeck for me.

Tweetdeck bridges twitter with facebook!

Today tweetdeck integrated with facebook connect to allow posting tweets or facebook updates or both all from tweetdeck. Nick O Neil predicted this last week but I am not sure I agree with the recommendation of name change as tweetdeck has brand equity.



What does it mean for facebook users on twitter:

• First it gives you control on what tweets you want to share as status updates on facebook. So if you have a twitter app making all your tweets as status updates, it is time to turn it off.
• After all the talk about facebook vs twitter it makes us think about what we mean when we post something, is it for specific friends, or we just thinking aloud w/o thinking about the world or something else
• Tweetdeck solves a problem that twitter offers and facebook doesn't, ok, to some extent. You can call out a friend with a @reply on twitter, now you can call that friend on a status update on facebook from twitter using tweetdeck.

You can get the beta of tweetdeck here. Look at the comments here, they talk about user's excitement and how they are asking for more.

I love the innovation and how competition is getting us better goodies!!!!

Share your experience, are you using this as a twitter user or facebook user or a tweetdeck loyalist, how do you see it affecting your social updates.