P@ Log

After giving talks in 6 universities in Argentina at the beginning of the OpenSocial South America Tour, we organized a hackathon at the Globant office in Buenos Aires.
It was the most successful hackathon we organized so far: 100 developers stormed the Globant office, and after a few talks by representatives from Joyent, Globant, Google, MySpace, Sonico and Vostu, they got to coding and created 10 applications that they demoed at the end of the day.
Globant has organized this really well: they emptied all desks in their office and created a wired network just for the event: talk about agile! And they had free massages for developers between 2 coding sessions.

The apps were so good that the jury had trouble determining the winners. Agustin Baretto, a developer from Globant, won the first prize with an application that lets you send SMS to all your friends. Here’s a picture of him.

You can find the Google presentation as well as pictures of the hackathon in my previous post

Sonico appointed a photographer and they have great pictures of the event but you have to create an account to see them.

Here are a few video interviews I did during the hackathon.
Interview with Guibert Englebienne, CTO and co-founder of Globant

Walk through the Globant Tech Park, a very Googley office space
The Globant office has a music studio for engineers to chill out and play music. Guibert Englebienne, CTO and co-founder of Globant, shows us the studio. Next to it was a massage room where you could get a massage between writing 2 pages of code.

Interview with Manu Rekhi from Google, product manager for Orkut

Interview with John Faith, VP Engineering for MySpace

Interview with Augusto Becciu, developer of TweetWheel
Augusto came to the hackathon in Buenos Aires to start porting TweetWheel to OpenSocial. TweetWheel has an incredible UI, check it out at http://www.tweetwheel.com/. It is built on Google App Engine.

Interview with Martin from Wixi
Martin is implementing Shindig PHP for the media social network wixi, which is based in Paris.

Interview with Martin Milero and Maximiliano Rios
Martin and Maximiliano are 2 Globant engineers. They won the 2nd prize with their soccer betting application.

I’ll speak in a panel there, about social platforms for gaming: should be fun.

Augusto came to the hackathon in Buenos Aires to start porting TweetWheel to OpenSocial. TweetWheel lets you determine whom among your friends know each other: he created it for Twitter where friend means follow, but it could be extended to a social graph extracted from an OpenSocial container (hence Augusto’s presence at the hackathon).
TweetWheel has an incredible UI, a neat visualization entirely in javascript, and is built in Python on Google App Engine: I’d say Augusto is the poster child of Google APIs.
He presented his app at the end of the hackathon, in a special category, because he had not finished to port, but drew a few hos and has of appreciation.

Irma Van Der Walt was our translator for the university tech talks about OpenSocial. She had a fun story about hi5. To the hi5 team: you chose your name well!

2 weeks ago I invited Dan Carroll from SOMR to give a tech talk at Google about SOMR’s social recommendation engine. This is a very interesting topic: here is the video.

From OpenSocialSou…

Today Bruno Rovagnati’s parents invited the whole OpenSocial gang for an Asado. Eating meat and drinking wine: what a social and civilized way of spending a sunny afternoon!
Bruno’s brother prepared and cooked the meat, it was delicious! More images of the afternoon on the photo album.

From OpenSocialSou…

The OpenSocial South America Tour started on monday in Buenos Aires and Tandil, Argentina, and it’s a lot of fun!

Here are some pictures of the first 2 days, I will add more to this album as we go.

And here are the slides of yesterday’s presentation:

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Dave blogs about blogs.sun.com’s 100,000’s post. Wow time passes fast! Seems yesterday when I wrote the first post celebrating John Hoffmann and William Snow for deploying Roller so fast. Linda Skrocky posts the picture of the chairman award we got for creating blogs.sun.com, but I’m not on it (in vacations). Hopefully here’s my Photoshopped version of the award. I love that picture: a virtual presence at an award event after 4 years working remotely.

Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian (now chief economist at Google) is the best book about technology strategy I have read. It was published in 1998, 10 years ago, so the examples are Netscape vs Microsoft, or Microsoft vs Intuit, but the examples are just illustrations of deeper principles that apply today more than ever.
During the panel at Web 2.0 Expo this morning “Comparing Social Platforms”, I explained that building a standard like OpenSocial was a direct application of Chapter 8 and 9 of this book. I recommend anyone interested in technology strategy to read it.

When we talked about specific verticals to be socialized, Dave Morin from Facebook who was in the panel said: “We look at it as a market: there are many verticals to be socialized”.

This echoes a quote from the book that applies very much to OpenSocial: “Standards change competition for a market to competition within a market.”

I do hope that Facebook ends up implementing OpenSocial and joins the market that this standard is creating for developers:-)

Today I’ll be representing Google (Orkut and iGoogle) at the “Comparing Social Platforms” Panel at Web 2.0 moderated by Justin Smith from the Inside Facebook blog.
There will be representatives from facebook, MySpace, Bebo and SixApart. Should be a fun panel.

One of the questions he plans to ask is about viral channels and balancing user and developer interest. I will just point to the survey he posted today about Which viral channels do Facebook users hate most about apps?

Invitations and profile clutter seem to be user’s two worse pet peeves. Both Orkut and iGoogle will soon implement user to user messenging, but eschewed invitations for now, prefering developers to use the Activity Stream to spread their app, because it provides for a more “organic” way of spreading an application. About Organic vs Viral spread, see Kevin Marks’ very good post from February.