Onno's Blog

Met with Tom and Rob yesterday evening at Timothy Patrick’s – an Irish pub, appropriate no? – to brainstorm on how to grow the Rochester Java User Group. How to get on average a larger turnout at the meetings, how to attract more members.

Over the last year or so we did manage to attract quite good speakers – James Gosling, Ted Leung, Neal Gafter, Brain Leonard and others. But the size of the audience could have been better for these speakers and topics. So we’re going to try a number of things to see if we can change this.

One approach is to broaden how we reach out and connect to the membership. Currently the main avenue is the web site and the mailing list. We’re going to try some of the social networking places like LinkedIn and Twitter to give potential interested developers more ways to find us and to communicate with us. The mailing list is mainly one directional, a LinkedIn group gives the possibility for a member to start discussions. And the web site could do with a refresh.

Getting good speakers is one thing, making sure speakers cover topics that match the local interest is at least as important. To that end we’re going to hook up with local companies doing Java development and talk to them about what value RJUG could provide to their developers. In this vein, we do get regular participation from RIT (one or two of the professors, a few students) but not much if any from UfoR (maybe because the meeting is at RIT?), and so an action item for me to go talk to the faculty there.

In addition to learning about new Java technologies the user group is seen as a place for networking. While our meetings aren’t specifically geared towards that, we do have a social aspect attached to each meeting: those interested go to McGregor’s (aka Conference Room M) afterwards just ti chat. Something we don’t really advertise in the meeting announcements (ie you have to have been to a meeting to know about it).

During the summer months it is always hard to get people into a conference room in the evening. Thus far this meant we don’t have meetings then because of the very low turn out. Perhaps during that time of year we solely focus on the networking aspect at a nice beet garden and forego the formal part.

In good silicon valley style we decided that we need a logo and a t-shirt. Now, Duke was open sourced under a BSD license, so no hurdles to our creative skills!

How the world has progressed from mailing lists and bulletin board systems. Where is Compuserve?

I continue to find “social networking” fascinating. I put the term between quotes; it is not as if humans weren’t socially networking before the founding of MySpace or Facebook. All these nodes in the world wide web do underwrite that humans are social animals first. The success of the telephone a century ago, the ringtone explosion, Japanese teenagers sending each other grainy photographs on their mobile phones and so on.

Social networking intrigues me both personally and professionally. I live in Rochester, NY but most of my family and many of my friends are elsewhere – personal web sites, Facebook friends, twitter updates all help staying in touch with each other and so over a distance of thousands of miles and six time zones I still know that Gero is stuck in a 3 1/2 hour traffic jam due to a truck accident. I have to say though that much of my family is disappointedly cyberspace-inactive. Professionally it helps maintaining connections with peers in the industry while we all move positions, change jobs – and it adds to a manager’s ability to stay aware of the professional well-being of remote colleagues (Facebook status updates can give interesting hints on a colleague’s gearing up for a job change). In my usage I try to separate LinkedIn contacts and Facebook friends between professional, work-related and personal respectively although the line is rather blurry.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter are all so successful also because they feed into the narcissistic tendencies of many of us allowing us, encouraging us to twirl our experiences, our virtues onto the world. I happily do. Yesterday I went on a bike ride. Before the ride I twitter that I am about to do this and I twitter upon return. The pictures from the ride need to be uploaded to my .Mac gallery, to Flickr, to Facebook and I need to write about the ride on this blog. The stats recorded by my bicycle computer are uploaded to BikeJournal. If I read something interesting on cycling or social networking then I need to bookmark that to del.icio.us. And in between I need to worry about my Technorati authority (only 2, what’s up with that?). All this easily takes much more time than the bike ride itself.

Am I profiling myself enough? How much would my personal brand gain if I also joined Friendster, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Livejournal? Heard the other day that World of Warcraft is becoming Golf of this millennium – the place where business deals get done. I never played golf so maybe I have a shortcut here?

At the same time email is still a key communication tool. With the 11066 unread emails I have as of this writing, keeping up with all the twitter messages, facebook status updates, flickr discussions etc etc how do you stay abreast of that deluge of information? How do you know what to pay attention to and when? How to avoid being interrupted by each incoming email during writing a paper or software? Last week I unfollowed someone because he was just twittering too much.

An MIT project now implemented at MovableType, Action Streams, can be useful. Action Streams allow you to aggregate and share your actions and profiles around the web in one place. Maybe that can optimize my “post ride”-workflow?Ambient information devices then help you assess the state of information waiting for you. There is the Chumby – love to get a few of those. There’s the glowing orb. The cute rabbit by Nabaztag.

For now I am starting in a cheap and simple way. Our Mac Mini is supposed to be our media server but actually spends a lot of its time on my desk. By keeping it in Dashboard mode I can have occasional glances at stock quotes, the weather, San Francisco web cams, IP addresses on our home network, Dutch headlines, Facebook and twitter updates, and a world clock.

My favorite app? Twitterrific
Want to see who is twittering on a particular subject? http://search.twitter.com
Want to get suggestions for people to follow on twitter? http://crazybob.org/twubble
Want to follow one of the Mars rovers? https://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix
Want to make sure a plant in New York City has enough water? http://twitter.com/pothos
If twitter had existed in the late 80-ies, early 90-ies then the web may never have happened and the scientists at CERN may have used twitter to check if the coffee was brewing…
One of your twitter friends talking too much? http://twittersnooze.com/
Who twitters the most? http://twitterholic.com/top100/updates/
Connecting twitter to facebook? http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php?ref=logo#/apps/application.php?id=2231777543
Connecting twitter to your wordpress blog? http://www.velvet.id.au/twitter-wordpress-sidebar-widget/
Teach your Chumby to twitter? http://www.chumby.com/guide/widget/Twitter
Easily check how many followers someone has? http://twittercounter.com/
Love, hare, think, believe, feel, wish? http://twistori.com/
Traffic and transit delays? http://www.commuterfeed.com/
Need a personal assistant? http://iwantsandy.com/
Anybody twittering in your neighborhood? http://twitterlocal.net
Connect to your Google Calendar? http://twittercal.com/
Must follow Apple on twitter? http://twitter.com/appleinc
Addicted to Heroes? http://twitter.com/heroespodcast or http://twitter.com/Heroescast
Want to hear a secret, or tell one? http://twitter.com/twittersecret
An admirer of His Pastafied Diety? http://twitter.com/FSM
Ehh, The While House? http://twitter.com/TheWhiteHouse
What’s the weather like in Toronto? http://twitter.com/wxtoronto
Twitter protecting the home? http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2008/05/14/keep-tab-on-home-security-with-a-webcam-and-twitter.html
See in real time where tweets are sent from? http://twittervision.com/
What’s the traffic like on the M5? https://twitter.com/UK_M5_Traffic
The telephone book for twitters? http://justtweetit.com/
Keep track of your favorite cat? http://twitter.com/morriscat
Which of your friends know each other? http://www.tweetwheel.com/
Be alerted when someone stops following you? http://twitterless.com/
The 2008 Twitties winners? http://twitties.com/
Dutch news? http://twitter.com/telegraaf
Can’t do without tweets in Second Life? http://ordinalmalaprop.com/twitter/