Foo Camp can influence you before you go
19. Jun, 2007 
2 Comments
It should be a fun weekend at Foo Camp. I attended one of the first Bar Camps in Toronto in January of 2006, and I really liked the un-conference style. I even sponsored it through ObjectSharp, the company I was a partner at before I came to Microsoft to build IronRuby. I met a ton of folks in the Toronto start-up scene there, and remain in contact with a lot of those folks today.
One thing that Foo Camp made me do was to take a closer look at social networks. Folks who are at Foo Camp are part of a social network created by the folks over at CrowdVine. Shortly after I got my invitation, the Foo Camp CrowdVine network was created, and I started playing around with the software. At roughly the same time, a friend at Microsoft ‘friended me’ on my largely dormant Facebook account. I responded, looked through his friend list, added some friends in common and got hooked on the idea.
Most folks my age (39) aren’t in Facebook. I found exactly two people from my high school, and two more from college (although strangely enough, my Ph.D. thesis supervisor is there …). However, I found an awful lot of folks from the Ruby community and the startup community. I also found lots of younger folks at Microsoft, and some older folks who are trying to figure out this new medium.
What strikes me is how there is a winner-take-all networking effect happening with Facebook. I doubt that I’ll keep my CrowdVine network around; instead I’ll try to convince folks that I meet at Foo Camp who aren’t already on FaceBook to join that instead. And with all of the recent buzz around Facebook, that’s hardly surprising.
Give it a try, you’ll never know who you’ll run into.
Hi John, looking forward to meeting you at Foo Camp and glad that you’re getting into social networking. There’s definitely a bigger-is-better dynamic for some social network use cases. Facebook and LinkedIn are killing in that area. However, the point of the Foo Camp network is to help people connect right before and right after the conference. It’s a temporary network although it’ll stay up for historical reasons.
Looking forward to meeting you too, Tony!
I like your software more in some ways than Facebook, but the platform play that those guys are making right now makes an awful lot of sense.