Yesterday the guys from Twitter Ben Fullerton, Alex Payne, and Blaine Cook led a session at BarCamp about their microblogging sensation, Twitter.  Their tagline,"What are you doing?" encourages people to participate. In an earlier session we talked about all the cool things we could do with Twitter but they noted there are some constraints to the system (140 characters, SMS, etc.). Frequent Twitter users know that the service has had many ups and downs outages and slowness, growing pains caused by overwhelming success. 

Here is what the Twitter guys shared in their talk:

• Twitter measures success by number of updates even though they have had their biggest page views week every.
• 60% of Web traffic is International
• 39% of web traffic comes from Japan but doesn’t work on Japanese phones
• During the 4th quarter of the SuperBowl the Twitter usage spiked by greater than 2x that of any other point in the game.
• Alex Payne said that Twitter’s number one priority right now is stability
• Page views per Month is way more than 300 million, in a much shorter amount of time.
• 80% of Twitter users follow less than 10 people

Their challenge is to make Twitter more relevant outside of the technical crowd. They stated their goal is to figure out how to increase the number of rich meaningful interactions not creating large networks of people. I would have never guessed how addictive Twitter would become for me but now that I am hooked I look forward to what’s next. 

Technorati Tags: Alex Payne, Austin, BarCamp, Ben Fullerton, Blaine Cook, Twitter

BarCamp Enterprise Systems Management is going on in Austin this weekend if you are interested in systems management please feel free to attend.

J. BLACK’S, Feel Good Lounge
710 W. 6th
Austin, Texas 78701
512.535.8283
www.jblacks.com

Friday Night (01/18/08):

We are planning a kick off party Friday night at J. BLACKS starting around 6pm.  This will be a good time to get to meet, plan, and enjoy.

Saturday (01/19/08)

Thedoors will open at 9am and then go till around 5 or 6pm. Beverages willbe served during the entire time, and we are making arrangements forLunch and Dinner too.

In true Barcamp style most of the sessions will be arranged and scheduled dynamically by the participants.

Technorati Tags: Austin, BarCamp, ESM, Systems Management

This morning I dragged my butt out of bed bright and early to attend FUDCon Raleigh 2008. Today started with Fedora Community Manager Max Spevack giving a Fedora state of the union. One impressive stat that Max shared was that of all the packages maintained by the Fedora project that 212 packages where maintained by Red Hat employees while 294 where maintained by people in the community. Also in it’s third year FUDCon drew over 100 people from all over the world.  I was also impressed how  enthusiastic the attendees.  Many times during  opening remarks the crowd erupted into thunderous applause.

The format for Saturday was BarCamp style so everyone took turns pitching sessions (see the line on the right) then we voted and the most popular sessions got space. The most popular session was Michael Tiemann’s Fedora for the Enterprise – Hosting for the Future. So that session ran first. Michael as usual full of interesting stories about CTO’s that had started using Fedora in their Enterprise (though he was clear that there was room for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora). I was interested to hear about EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). EPEL is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spin-offs such as CentOS or Scientific Linux. In other words if you are looking to make it easy for your software to be included or easily installed for Fedora users this is a good place to start. 

Other interesting talks I hope to attend include:

• Legal Q&A with former Red Hat Counsel, Mark Webbink
• Zimbra
• OLPC/Asus EEE get together
• Teaching OSS – a very cool session, NC State is actually teaching OSS development
• Cobbler (Install Server)

More to come later today.

Technorati Tags: 2008, BarCamp, Fedora, FUDCon, Max Spevack, Michael Tiemann, Open Source, Raleigh, Red Hat

We have the venue for BarCamp Enterprise Systems Management

The sign-up sheet shows representatives from OpenNMS, Zenoss, Nagios, Alterpoint, BMC, Sun, IBM, Puppet. It should be a good opportunity to come speak with people who develop the software you might already use. 

J. BLACK’S, Feel Good Lounge
710 W. 6th
Austin, Texas 78701
512.535.8283
www.jblacks.com

Friday Night (01/18/08):

We are planning a kick off party Friday night at J. BLACKS starting around 6pm.  This will be a good time to get to meet, plan, and enjoy.

Saturday (01/19/08)

The doors will open at 9am and then go till around 5 or 6pm. Beverages will be served during the entire time, and we are making arrangements for Lunch and Dinner too.

In true Barcamp style most of the sessions will be arranged and scheduled dynamically by the participants.  However the three panel session times will be posted shortly in the sessions page (http://barcamp.org/BarCampESMSessions).

Technorati Tags: Austin, BarCamp, enteprise, Systems Management, TX