First Blogger Dinner, Facebook apps and the likelihood I’ll keep the blog up to date…

First of all, I’m willing to bet that most would say this title is too long and I would have to agree but it does encompass everything that this blog post will most likely be about.

Second, I created this blog, my third attempt I believe, out of threat from one of the bloggers at the blogger/geek dinner that I attended this evening. He said I couldn’t come back til I had started one. I laughed at this but began to think about how important it seemed to have been to all in attendance of the dinner. I think that it is the fact that it has engendered a sense of community to those that live here in the Utah. Perhaps some of my new found pals from the blogosphere will comment on this?

But I must say that the dinner was pretty much what I expected and that expectation is that it was pretty amazing. The energy was high and the geek talk was flowing as was the barbecue. I think this night will be the beginning of many more like it.

Now on to Facebook applications, which directly relates to the dinner. Since about half of the conversation this evening was in regards to Facebook applications. The possibilities are truly unlimited… Er, and by unlimited I mean limited to what you can do with the Facebook API. I think that the developers out there moving in on the Facebook user base are doing so clumsily, sort of like when the first bits of the internet where the general populace could interact especially since the API is so very new and so very untested. It will take some time for it all to mature, the API itself as well as the applications being designed. Although I worry that Facebook is the new AOL mainly because I despised AOL’s walled garden when the open web was available.

Oh and I have a terrible track record when it comes to blogs… Just wanted to get that out there.

Matthew Reinbold Says:

July 27, 2007 at 3:19 pm

Nice site and glad to see that death threats are an effective motivator. But really, how chilling can ominous fist shaking from a UT blogger be? What are they going to do, green jello your house?

As far as facebook it was pretty exciting to see the tutorial that Jesse (http://jessestay.com/) gave. However, I think its important to remember that – unlike the Internet – Facebook is a private company with its own interests to protect. This cropped up in a conversation later in the evening. A friend had created a killer facebook app that would have a ton of value – and also violated the Facebook terms of service. He wasn’t doing anything malevolent; he was simply trying to pipe data from Facebook (a closed system) to something open and translatable. This is against Facebooks terms of service because think of how much leverage Facebook looses if the carefully compiled information people put into their profiles is suddenly easy to move elsewhere. Its an incredibly short-sighted (and last millennium) way of doing business but the ‘circle-the-wagons’ mentality does still exist.

Facebook is very cool but until they give clearance to let the data in their system go where the user wants it (even if that’s to a different system) I reserve the title of ‘Greatest Thing Since Pop Tarts’ for something else.