Category Archives: Web2.0

Announcing PodCampSLC – January 2008

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PodCampSLC-PodCamp-Salt-Lake-City-Utah Hello everyone, well, you knew it was bound to happen. PodCamp has come to Salt Lake City, Utah. On Saturday January 26th, 2008, at the Salt Lake Main Library building, 210 East 400 South, we will hold the first PodCamp.

The web site address is www.podcampslc.org. You can confirm your registration at the Upcoming.org site.

If you would be interested in helping with the organization of this event, please send an email to podcampslc AT gmail.com.

We still have a lot to do and need a lot of help. Please consider volunteering. We also need people to present, so if you’re a new media guru or RockStar, please let us know what you can share.

There are also sponsorship opportunities. We would love to share those with you as well.

PodCamp isn’t just about podcasting! If you’re interested in blogging, social media, social networking, podcasting, video on the net, if you’re a podsafe musician (or want to be), or just someone curious about new media, then please join us — and bring a friend or colleague.

The event will be free of charge to the public but we would really appreciate advance registration so we know how many people will be attending.

We have also created a Facebook group where we will communicate a lot of the activities of the PodCamp. If your not a member of Facebook we encourage you to join. It’s a great opportunity to connect with others who have the same interest as you.

Please blog about this event as often as possible. Spread the word. Invite your blog readers, your podcast listeners and your videocast watchers. We want everyone to attend, from beginners to pros.

There will be more information to follow.

Facebook Pages Get You Noticed

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Facebook recently launched a new feature to their fairly closed site called Pages. Everyone is hung up on the advertising part of pages. But, a savvy networker can create a page as an external profile. Unless you are a Facebook member you really can’t see much. But now with a Page you can create something everyone can see. Let’s try it out:

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As you can see from the image above, when you try and access my Facebook profile you just get a login page. Not real cool but that’s how it is. Now, if you create a Page in your Facebook account you can have some public information exposed including a picture and some summary information:

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The area in red to the right is where I think Facebook should allow for additional content. When you are logged into Facebook there are several sections of details.

The bottom area in red is where you are able to provide some type of summary information. A web site link, a description, a mission statement and product information. You could however set your page up to provide links to several of your web sites, a little about you and maybe what you do for a living.

This isn’t a perfect solution but at least someone can see who you are without actually being a member. There is one draw back to this though, no vanity URL, mine looks like this, http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6351869262, and I’m not sure how search engine friendly that is. You could do some type of domain forwarding like profile.digitalthom.com and point to this page but it seems like a lot of work.

Here is a link to iJustine’s Facebook page. Here is her blog post about it.

Oh, and what would be really cool, is to put an invitation to join Facebook on your profile page. You really can’t get the full experience unless you’re a member. And being a member of Facebook isn’t a bad thing.

Excellent Utah Facebook Developer Garage

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Yesterday was the second Utah Facebook Developer Garage and we had a decent turnout. We talked about a couple new features of the Facebook API, Mobile capabilities and the new Invitation screen.

I want to thank Tim Stay of Know More Media for letting us use his conference room at the last minute. We had munchies, discussed the viability of Facebook and Social network applications, and future Garage events. I think fun was had by all.

I posted a couple of pics on the Facebook group, but I also posted them here for those not a member of Facebook.

Also, thanks to Jess Stay for making sure this whole thing happened.

Facebook Opens API To Mobile Developers

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This is a very exciting addition to the Facebook developer platform. One major application I’m writing will definitely take advantage of these new features, specifically SMS. I use Facebook via my mobile device most of the time. I’m exciting this new addition to the API will bring richer applications to market.

Reading more about the SMS feature of the API it seems there is a throttle on the number of messages that can be sent out. That makes sense seeing how there is a cost to send out messages. However, I can also see this is as a drawback if you are writing an application and need to send out notifications each time an action occurs.

There seems to be 3 main parts of the SMS API.

  1. User opt-in
  2. Design features
  3. User opt-out

One really cool option is a user can interact with an application via SMS. I assume this means I can send commands back to an application and have it perform some type of function. It will remain to be seen if this can be a feature that is usable or not.

The next part of the API is access to the profile and canvas areas. This gives mobile developers the ability to make mobile applications act more like the full web based version. And if I’m not mistaken, you can write one application that can be used via the web or on a mobile device. That is very cool.

As a budding Facebook application developer I hope to take advantage of these features. I hope there is more to come regarding the mobile API.

Link to the Facebook Platform for Mobile.