Wow, what an awesome event. It was pretty much what I expected it to be, a bunch of people excited about the social media space getting together to talk about social media development. I was very impressed with both the quality and quantity of those that turned up. Some high caliber people from Bungee Labs, Twelve Horses, Podango, WordPress, the developers of ‘We’re Related!’ facebook app and of course the guest of honor Jeff Barr from Amazon. The amount that I actually learned last night was on the extreme side of things. The information that Jeff provided regarding Amazon’s Web Services was extremely interesting. I can definitely see why so many services use it for their base as Podango does. The real key that Amazon has hit on has been the ability to scale, without that ability many very worthy ideas have fallen under the cracks of heavy traffic load or cut off from their ISP due to increased bandwidth usage. With both the elastic computing cloud and the S3 storage solution that Amazon provides both can be avoided. Of course it doesn’t hurt that it allows smaller developers to get something out there almost instantly without having to contract with a host.
I’ll be honest, I hadn’t thought there was much in the way of social media development going on here in Utah. Or at least I didn’t think that any of those places might be hiring. I met so many people last night that just have a passion for whats going on in the social space right now and they were all pretty awesome! As long as these meet-ups are on a night that I can attend, I’ll be interested in getting there. What went on last night has fired up my passions for social media development again. And that excites me more than ever.
