BarCamp Phoenix

Today I attended BarCamp Phoenix. Thanks to James Britt and all the others who put this even together! These are my notes from the day.

List of What's Coming in the Future - Ray Neimeyer
Reviewed last year's topic & how relevant we still feel they are. (* marks something as relevant/exciting/still upcoming)

• Virtualization*
• Transcoding
• wpfe, flex
• Functional Programming going mainstream*
• Utility Virtualization
• Identity 2.0*
• Less AJAX
• RIA
• Personal Web Services
• URLs everywhere*
• Tele-Immersion
• VOIP
• TV Advertisements on Web
• Ubiquitous Recording*
• Return to Print
• Fabrication*
• Living Room Computing (HTPC)*
• Digital Paper*
• User Context
• Municipal Wi-Fi
• A/B Split Testing on the web*
• SD Radio
• Better Battery Technology*
• OpenSource Revolution*

New Topics

• Localization
• Open Source Phones
• Utility Computing
• Darknets
• Custom Programming Languages
• Open Source Culture Everywhere
• Blurred Definition of Computer - phones, EPC, etc
• Solid State Storage / Bio Storage
• Privacy Awareness / More Anonymity
• Transparency
• User-generated content
• Self Distribution

Google Bigtable - Maulik Shah, software engineer at Google, internal systems - things that Google uses (HR, collections)
Bigtable: A distributed storage system for structured data
Paper was written by a number of people at Google
How would you take care of 100 terabytes of data?
Google Earth 70TB, Google Analytics 200TB, Crawling Internet 800TB
1 terabyte is about 100 people's pictures
Bigtable is essentially a map: distributed, persistent, multi-dimensional,
Google is known for using bad hardware so the engineers have to plan for failures & redundancy.
Most of this discussion I didn't understand, but I did find the row ID fascinating. IT's a URL backwards. It means all the data is in one place, or in order. Don't have to go to multiple machines in different locations for the same data.
It seems that the database know how to balance the load. It will move tablets that are too large to a new machine so there's enough room. Locking happens when a machine fails. Then another machine will pick up the tasks of the failed machine and the lock is removed. The mechanism for the locking is called "Chubby" and obviously, it's critical Chubby doesn't fail.

The community would like to engage people at Google more. How do we get the word out?
http://azgroups.org/ - one calendar for all groups

Lunch - pizza sponsored by Google

Online Contact Management - Brian Shaler
"When you join a social network (eg Twitter) how do you find out which of your 'real life' friends are already on it? Email/Ask them all?" - Most responded to post on Twitter
Import address book, search for names, but there's no real good solution.
Some solutions: Plaxo - centralized address album, vCard, hCard, RSS
Brian came up with XID. "X" for XML; eXtensible ID card.
Recently started working on it. See "Braincrack" (ideas that get stuck in your head) from Ze Frank.
brian.shaler.name/xid/alpha/register - option online resource to setup XID
A url gets rendered - xidcard.com/your_id
Plus there's a Firefox extension in the works.

Facebook Apps - April Holle
What are the basic building blocks for Facebook?
Consider building on top of the "social network." Think about the growth you can have by touching your audience. Think about what they, their friends, their family, etc. will find useful in their daily life.
News feed - it's very difficult to get an app listed in news (yet customers really, really want this)
Notifications - person to person
Messages - applications can send messages
Good examples of apps - Food Fight
What is the Facebook value? 6th most traffic-ed site in US

Virtualization - Kimbro Staken