Posts Tagged ‘ Social Media ’

Twitter: Above and Beyond

I sincerely feel as if I am beating a dead horse here and probably preaching to the choir in regards to the usefulness of the social networking tool known as Twitter.  But after seeing this article in regards to how a UC Berkeley student was able to notify his fellow students of his arrest and them in turn notifying the proper authorities to help him get out I don’t think I can say it enough. Oh, did I mention?  The guy was in Egypt.  Being arrested for taking photographs of a noisy demonstration.  And those authorities his friends notified?  Oh little groups like the embassy in Egypt and UC Berkeley itself to which they were able to provide legal counsel to get him sprung.

The ease of use for what was referred to in the article as a ‘wire service’ was probably pretty incomprehensible just a decade ago.  In addition to that it has much more real implications locally, today I found out about a meetup with a few locals and someone from Seattle that was in town just to sit and lunch and discuss whatever we felt like discussing.  This has particular interest to me because I am legitimately thinking of moving to Seattle or Portland or San Francisco (Live in one of those cities? Follow me on Twitter!).  And I just made friends with someone who lives in one of those cities.  When using networks like Twitter you’ve got to go above and beyond, you’ve got to think of the possibilities of how it can affect you on a day to day basis and how it can affect you in times of crisis.  So, I challenge you;  If you haven’t signed up for Twitter yet, then do so.  If you have already friend me up and then proceed to friend up someone in another city… You never know when they may come to yours or vice versa.

SMS Podcast Episode 1

Wanted to make a brief mention of the new podcast that I have launched title the SMS Podcast.  The idea is to focus on news in the social media space.  Head over to SMSPodcast on wordpress to check it out.  Feel free to leave feedback anywhere you know I’ll be (Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, this blog, or the SMS Blog).

Thanks!

First Utah Social Media Developers Garage

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.

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