Pallian Creative

I just got back from Chirp, the official twitter developer conference in San Francisco and what can I say - it was awesome! I know this blog suffered some down time as a result of my travel, but the awesomeness I brought back will hopefully make up for it.

I’m always a bit skeptical about conferences… some are poorly organized, some are just marketing gimmicks and others are usually just an excuse to go to Vegas for a few days. Chirp, however, was a wickedly well organized geek fest. Let me start by saying that the Carsonified team did a superb job. From the little details like having individually printed name badges that also doubled as the conference schedule to the signature Carsonified design of the stage and the slideshows, and not to mention the very awesome chirp t-shirt… the attention to detail were much appreciated. Kudos.

All right, moving on to the actual conference. I’m not going to give you a full run down like the tech blogs, but instead highlight a few things that were of interest to me. For example, did you know twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users and gets a whooping 300K new users a day? As an app developer, I was excited to see the launch of dev.twitter.com and the full release of @anywhere, Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect (see it in action above when you hover over @biz or @ev). Another interesting launch was twitter’s new geo API called “Places”. Without calling it a “check-in”, twitter is trying to bring relevancy to local users and search. Details were sparse - so expect to hear more about this in the near future.

On the rumor side, twitter hinted that photos and videos will soon be able to be attached to tweets without having to use a desktop client or having to go to twitpic. What was unclear was if that meant an acquisition of twitpic or if they were just going to build their own photo sharing widget. And with all the recent chatter about twitter going behind the developer community, it’ll be interesting to see what direction they take. Twitter investor @sacca tried to nail those questions in the last session of the day, asking tough questions to all the twitter executives onstage and voicing developer concerns about competition and support. @ev’s reaction: “The thing I learn time after time is that if people don’t have visibility the natural reaction is to think it’s nefarious. While there is some natural tension, I think we can communicate a lot better.”

So what is my takeaway from all this? Well, for one, like @fredwilson blogged last week, if you’re a developer, stop trying to fill holes. Work on a vertical that can really take advantage of twitter’s platform and perfect it. For example, chart.ly, an app I sold to Stocktwits about a year ago, got it right - we enabled active traders to share stock charts on twitter. Other verticals like shopping, movies, geo-location, gaming and analytics all have equally huge potential. In short, focus on building rich web and mobile app that takes advantage of people’s willingness to overshare.

Chrip ended on a high note (literally) with Will.i.am spinning some awesome tracks at the after party. By 3am, the only people left on the dance floor were a handful of twitter employees and its founders. Let just say there’s nothing better than watching @ev rock it on the dance floor and knowing that we’re just at the beginning of something very big and very awesome in the years to come.

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Introducing our latest project - a brand spanking new awesome blog aptly named THISISAWESOME.COM! This blog is for all you cool cats who just love to find and browse awesomeness all day long. With twitter and facebook peeps pushing out so much awesome content daily, I felt it needed a permanent spot in the interwebs - and THISISAWESOME.COM was born.

So go ahead, check it out… share it with your buddies, browse while you’re bored at work, submit some of your own awesomeness and have fun!

AWESOME!
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