mikecummins24's blog

The AOL Developer Network team is a sponsor of Mashup Camp IV at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA this week. The event lasts for four days; the first two days (Monday and Tuesday) are Mashup University and the last two days (Wednesday and Thursday) are Mashup Camp. AOL’s presence includes a booth and speakers at both University and Camp.

Mashup University

Tuesday afternoon was full for the network team with a speed-geeking session that included Terry Hayes along with four AOL presentations by different employees.

The AOL Developer Network team is on the road for most of the month June, with three major sponsorships at external events. This week, we were in Santa Monica, CA where the team participated in Digital Hollywood Spring. Participation included a booth on the trade show floor along with speakers in four sessions. Next week, June 20-22, we will be in San Francisco at SuperNova and June 26-29, we will be in Las Vegas were we are sponsoring the Topcoder Open (TCO) 2007 competition.

The upcoming event details, along with AOL participation is shown below. If you plan to attend these events, please stop by the booth and attend the sessions to hear about our Open Services strategies.

On June 1st, AOL held its first “Un-conference”. Kaliya Hamlin came and facilitated the day and as always did a great job. The event was sponsored by the AOL Architecture Council and the goal was to build community around technologies and strategies that are key to AOL's success. Since this was the first un-structured conference here, there was some nervousness about how well it would work. However, there was no need for any nervousness, as there were over 100 participants and the day's grid of sessions quickly filled to almost full. We had a lot of good discussions ranging from Ruby (intro and deployment), to Reputation, to Mobile applications. There were also discussions about Open Source strategies, RSS and monetization, and what it means to have a cultural shift from a "proprietary" company to one based on being open. A couple of interesting take aways from the session:

• Feedback about the format was very positive. Participants liked the concept that they determined the session topics.
• There were over 30 sessions held over five time slots. The were so many good sessions, it was hard to determine which one(s) to attend.
• Participants were cross functional and cross organizational. There were lots of opportunities to learn about efforts in different parts of the company.

My perspective: We need to do this more often. Most people are heads-down on their projects and caught up in the day-to-day challenges around launching a product. This is a great opportunity to get people away from their desks, promote face-to-face collaboration and sharing across organizations and projects, all done while having fun.

Last but not least, here are some pictures from the event.

This is Part 2 of a 2 Part blog on the Social Computing Industry Panel that was held on Saturday, May 12, 2007 at the WWW2007 conference. Panelists included Andrew Hopkins from Yahoo, Dick Hardt from Sxip Identity, Neel Sandaresen from eBay and Greg Cypes from AOL. Mike Beltzner from Mozilla moderated the panel.

Mike asked about the implications that occur when a social networking site / service grows very quickly. He showed the following data about Facebook growth and asked each panelist to comment:

Users July 2006 – 7M
Users Feb 2007 – 18M

Canada select demographics
Population – 19.5M

This past week, the AOL Developer Network was the Platinum sponsor of the WWW2007 Conference in Banff, Canada. The conference focused on W3C initiatives in workshops, sessions, panels and keynotes. The AOL showing was prominent throughout the conference with our booth on the tradeshow floor, sessions by Arun Ranganathan, Mike Jones, Greg Cypes and a brief overview by yours truly of the AOL Developer Network at the Wednesday night reception that was sponsored by AOL.

This is Part 1 of a 2 Part blog on the Social Computing Industry Panel that was held on Saturday, May 12, 2007. Panelists included Andrew Hopkins from Yahoo, Dick Hardt from Sxip Identity, Neel Sandaresen from eBay and Greg Cypes from AOL. Mike Beltzner from Mozilla moderated the panel.

On Wednesday, April 4th, AOL employees and non-employees are invited to meet on AOL's campus to listen to industry leading experts talk about Java and Web 2.0. A full house of 200+ is expected for the event which will start at 1 PM and go until 5:30 PM, with a social following immediately. About 50% of the attendees are from outside of AOL.

We are very fortunate to have three of the leading experts in Java; Craig McClanahan, Rod Cope and Sang Shin. Each brings a unique perspective on the subject and we are expecting some lively discussion.

Some people may be wondering why AOL is having a free event that features industry experts AND invites developers and technologists from outside of the company to attend. The answer is that it is part of AOL's Open strategy. Last year, AOL made the decision to create and publish Open APIs for our core products. In conjunction with the AOL Open Strategy, we formed a Developer Network program that is responsible for the creation and promotion of our open strategies. As part of our outreach program, we are sponsoring key technology events throughout the year -- all with the purpose to share what we are doing, encourage participation and solicit feedback. This event is a forum that enables folks from different companies and backgrounds to come together to share experiences and build relationships that will help with future endeavors and efforts.