Vancouver Facebook Garage thoughts and follow up

Before I talk about the event I attended tonight, let me just start out with the fact that Facebook has probably changed my, and our, lives. I’ve long lived by the principle that social networking sites are not that affective when it forces us to sit behind terminals and not interact, calling each other friends when we’ve never even met in the really real world. Doesn’t sound very social, does it?

Facebook, on the other hand, falls outside of that premise. Granted that in the days that Friendster actually held ground, I was stuck in the Midwest of the U.S. where you tend to think of meeting other users to be utterly geeky, if not insanely dangerous or bizarre. In Vancouver, on the other hand, it’s made our lives incredibly busy, and that falls outside of things you do with your friends. And those are friends that I’ve actually made contact with in some way, most likely face to face.

In a way, that kinda brings us to the Vancouver Facebook Garage that occurred last night. Rebecca was sponsored to do the live blog for the event, and I should add that she rocked it. So much so that I’m not going to do much to recap it because all the details you need to know are there.

Photo credit: kk on Flickr

I will say that my major contribution to the night was bringing along my tripod for Roland to use for the live video stream of the entire event, but all of the presentations were of unique interest.

They all had something that you could take away from them if you looked at the overall, big picture of how a Facebook application could imply a concept to a different or new idea. I know that I took a lot of ideas away from the night for potential projects in the future, but those will remain to be seen. Plus, I wouldn’t have a clue as to where to start to make my own Facebook application.

Not to rip into the event, but there were some certain aspects of the evening I would have reconsidered if I had planned it. Perhaps I should have payed more attention to the Facebook event, but I didn’t know that the evening was scheduled from 5:30PM to 8:30PM. By the time the evening was over, there wasn’t much time within the eight minute break to find some food to put into my very empty stomach, not to mention any ideas as to where I could get water or find the washroom. Being the maiden event in Vancouver, I’m sure things will adjust for the next one.

Also, Kris Krug took some amazing photos during the evening, so you can check his flickr out for more shots from the event.

I’m not sure what or how I can take away some of the things that were presented last night, but there are a number of concepts that I can think of as to what I would add to Facebook in terms of an application. I’m just a little fuzzy as to how I’d do it, yet alone where to start. Maybe I’ll learn that in the next session where someone can point me to how a newbie can make a Facebook application.