Colin Charles Agenda

We’ve had MySQL meetup’s organised thanks to mysql.meetup.com for years now, and its sad to see the relationship end in about a fortnight. Never fret, because it seems that Facebook can do all that, and more.

Migration

If you’re the meetup organiser, and you checked the Members list, or even attempted to download it, you’ll be disappointed. You get a CSV file, with the name of the person, some other metadata, if they’re on the mailing list (chances is yes to all), and the URL of the member profile. What’s missing? An email address.

So while its nice to have a CSV copy of the member list, it will not assist you in any migration, whatsoever. Totally data lock in :-(

Mailing list/message board

Keep in mind that you’ve got mailing lists and message boards on meetup.com. You’ll want to make use of this, to tell people to join your new Facebook group. Mailing lists are of the form: mysql-GROUPNUM@meetup.com, and you can find out more from mysql.meetup.com/GROUPNUM/messages/archive.

In case you’ve had people unsubscribe from the mailing list, better make things redundant, to announce the move to Facebook, and also post to the message board.

As the owner of the meetup group, you can also edit the description of your meetup group – do so, pointing to the new Facebook address of the group.

Facebook Groups

Look at the bottom of your screen, and you’ll notice a little toolbar, and its not too hard to spot groups. Once you see the groups page, you will be able to “Create a New Group”. The exact link to creating a new group will work, as long as you’re logged into Facebook. Once you’re done, don’t hesitate to enter some relevant group information:

It’s probably worth noting that naming nomenclatures might be useful. Like I liberally used: The Malaysian MySQL User Group (Kuala Lumpur), but if you’re in a country like the United States, and you’re doing this in San Francisco, a name such as: The San Francisco MySQL User Group would make sense. Used similarly, like “The New York City User Group”, or if you’re in Australia, something like “The Melbourne MySQL User Group” will make sense. In that sense, I should really be calling the Malaysian one that I organise, “The Kuala Lumpur MySQL User Group”, and I have a feeling that once there are more meetups in the states around here, I will do just that.

Next up, you’re asked to upload a picture. Go ahead, make one up, or leave it blank. Something with your city in it, might be a good one. If the meetup group has a website, then enter its URL. The default settings on “Step 2: Customize” are all accurate, so just leave it be.

Once that is done, and you click “Save”, you’re asked to publish it on your wall. This is what I call publicity to those closest in your social network — you should go for it! You want all the help you can get, to spread the word, to make your meetup even more successful!

Now comes the fun part — you can invite your friends, or invite people via email — the choice is yours.

And that’s it, now you have a Facebook group, with an appropriate URL to point people to. In my case, the Malaysian MySQL User Group is at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=82091206683. Yes, the URL’s are not friendly, so maybe you want to make use of a URL shortener (Something like bit.ly, powered by MySQL).

What to do in the Facebook Group

The Facebook group you just created is useful. It displays the members, it has a discussion board facility, it has a wall (which may not be so useful, when it comes to actual discussion). It allows for members to post photos, links, videos, and more. In short, as long as all attendees are members of Facebook and the group, you’ve just created your own little virtual community!

Now, one thing that shone with Meetup.com was the ability to have a meetup once every month, and details go out to all members about topics, et al. Facebook allows this too. Select “Create Related Event”. In fact if you scroll down a little more, below Group Type, and Admins, you can also Create Events, as there is a nice Events tab, right before the Related Groups one.

Once you’ve selected Create an Event, you’re told to enter some event information, as follows:

That’s just basically filling up relevant information, the time, the location, and some contact details of the meetup organiser. Click Create Event, and magically, you now have a new event! Again, the defaults under customisation are perfectly safe, except, for the bottom, where you should scroll down, and under the “Publicize:” option, you definitely want to tick it, and say “Show this event in search results“. The more publicity, the better.

Click Save, and again, you’re asked to publish this to your wall, like above. If I were you, I’d go for it, so that even your friends who aren’t in the meetup group, might want to come depending on the topic being addressed in that particular month.

Like earlier, you can now invite guests (even via email) to the event, and once you’re done, you should have a similar page (looks so familiar to your group page, huh?) for the event in particular. Go forth and publish that URL on Twitter and other social networks, so more people show up :-)

Remember, that if anything changes, go back to the same event page, and select: “Message Guests”. This will allow them to all receive a Facebook message with the relevant information, changes, and so forth.

What else?

That’s basically it.

I can think of one more thing that Facebook has, that you don’t have on Meetup.com – that’s chat within the browser. You can chat with your friends, and meetup attendees potentially might want to confirm some last minute details, and the chat is a great feature.

One thing I find lacking is that you don’t have mailing lists. I’m an email type of guy, and if you want mailing lists, don’t hesitate to ask for one, at lists.mysql.com. We’ll be happy to provide yet another avenue to keep your meetups going strong.

Another strong point? You can be a member of multiple meetup groups, without having to leave your own. As someone who travels somewhat frequently, I love attending other user groups just to meet the community and see what they’re doing with MySQL. I can now, as events are open ;-)

Have questions? Leave a comment and I’ll get back to you. Otherwise, happy meeting users in your own areas and areas you’re travelling to!

I decided to experiment with Google Friend Connect today, after seeing the “Social bar” being used on the Open Source Bridge site. I had even set aside some time to start writing some code; to my surprise, Google did all the magic for me, and it didn’t even take me longer than five minutes to setup.

It was as simple as setting up a new site, uploading two files into ~/www/, then editing my Wordpress theme’s footer.php and adding the auto-generated code before the </body> tag (I did it after the <?php wp_footer(); ?> call though).

I immediately joined my own site. At first, I setup a profile, but then realised that I could import my profile from my usual Google one. Heck, I could even import a profile from Twitter! One thing I found odd, was that to edit my profile, I had to do it from the social bar itself (from the far left column).

The social bar – click for a larger version

On the far left column, you can join the site, or edit your profile and settings. Next to that, you can see the activity stream throughout the site. Next to that, you’re given the option to add comments. And on the far right, you can see like-minded visitors who’ve joined, and even become friends with them.

What does the social bar do for me?

1. It allows members to join my blog and be part of my community. Do you remember MyBlogLog (a Yahoo! service)? Well, Friend Connect allows me to have MyBlogLog type features, with no problem whatsoever.
2. It allows comments from members. These can be fine grained comments – either for the particular page, or for the whole site. In my experimentation, I’m using it for the whole site naturally. On a blog, if you’re going to write a comment of substance, you’re going to do it with the commenting facility available on the blog – however, if you just want to write throwaway comments, one-liners, “me too” replies or have one of those “chatboxes” that blogs tend to have, you’ll find the Friend Connect Social Bar to be quite useful.

I’ll be the first to admit, that its probably not too useful for me, per se, but I can see its usefulness for sites that require a lot of collaboration.

Sites that I think can benefit from Friend Connect? Kenny Sia – the Chatterbox can be replaced with the comments in Friend Connect, and frankly all the one-liner comments will be better suited for the Social bar’s comments (maybe on a per-page basis?) – plus, he’ll get a “community” for free. LiewCF can also benefit – the “members” feature provided by MyBlogLog (he currently boasts 1,441 members) can probably grow with Friend Connect, and all those one-liner comments again, can go into the comments of the Social bar. Not picking on either site, but I think they can “socialise” their sites a lot better.

MyBlogLog is kind of a walled garden. You need to have an account there (on Yahoo!). Friend Connect tends to be a bit more useful – you can either use a Google, AIM, Yahoo! or OpenID account to login (a lot of bloggers will already realise they have OpenID for free – wordpress.com, livejournal, et al provide this). I think it can be a bit more useful if it supported logins from Windows Live/MSN accounts too – after all, a large proportion of my non-geek friends are MSN users.

And if I join another community, that information is cross-pollinated to my other communities. As a site owner, you can even see “reports” of how social your site is, over time – this whole idea of data mining (ok, analytics) is highly useful.

What if you decided to use comments on your blog, for just that – comments. But use the Social bar to enter “blog suggestions”. Smells like Skribit, to some extent. Do I see myself keeping the Friend Connect Social bar at the bottom of my blog for long? Who’s to say. Let’s see if a community builds up around it. I think this will be most useful for sites that really want conversations amongst readers, something like the foss.my site, or other social sites.

Are you using Google Friend Connect? How? What are your thoughts on it? Don’t hesitate to share them in the comments (or via the Friend Connect Social Bar!).

John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, shares some insights and thoughts on Mozilla, and its a most interesting presentation to go through. The insights are (drizzled with some of my comments):

1. Superior Products Matter – Without excellent experience and utility, the rest is meaningless. This is true, even with MySQL – our aims and values have always been performance, reliability and ease of use.
2. Push (most) decision-making to the edges – I understand that as make sure your community has a significant voice (kind of like Wikipedia’s anyone edits policy, but there’s patrolling). He also suggests that on a regular basis, you need to have surprising innovation – things that blow people’s minds. In Mozilla’s case, there are a set of core values that everyone agrees too; decision making is with the module owners (very much like how the Linux kernel, tends to run), after all, groups have different ways of working. Mozilla has decision makers, that are even outside the “official” organisation – i.e. community has a voice. And communication, is key.
3. Communication will happen in every possible way (so make sure it’s reusable) – this means via Wikis, blogs, the bug tracker, IRC, forums/newsgroups, mailing lists, audio, video, Skype chat, real-life get-togethers, and probably more. Writing notes, and sharing them, might be useful – I’ve found that the Mozilla Weekly Progress Reports on Planet Mozilla (and especially from Zak Greant) to be really useful. I’m thinking of something similar, in the MySQL (and other Sun open source communities) scope. A lot of decisions tend to be taken up on IRC, and people go on hacking on stuff, without writing documentation (worklogs/blueprints), or consulting with the mailing lists – I guess we all have communication improvements in us.
4. Make it easy for your community to do the important things – Here the highlights are SpreadFirefox, Mozilla QA, localisation and more. A focus “to help others do more” should be the mantra of every community! I see it as very easy to translate Drizzle now, that its on Launchpad, but its not the same with MySQL. Translation, documentation, non-code related tasks tend to increase community contributions – though, what do you do when you already have an excellent manual?
5. Surprise is overrated – John suggests that surprise is the opposite of engagement, which is true – no one likes surprises, and everyone wants to feel they’re important and had a role to play when something has happened. The “inner circle” needs more participation. I remember back in the days of Red Hat Linux to Fedora… there was something called the “Fedora Merge” group, and this allowed externals to provide significant decisions towards the direction of the Fedora Project. This was eventually eclipsed by fedora-maintainers, and the various boards like FESCO, and so on. As a participant in the Merge group, I felt like I had a voice, and was part of the “cabal” (there is no cabal), or the inner circle, so to speak – decisions I made, mattered. The inner circle grew, so that everyone (a maintainer, i.e. a person who “deserved” a voice) could feel included. Similar things happened for documentation, marketing, and so on, with various members and boards.
6. Communities are not markets: members are citizens – John stats that citizens are more than consumers, bystanders and stake-holders – we are all citizens in the community (whether you’re a paid staff member, or an external). The best citizens even challenge the status quo, propose improvements and make the conversation richer – I think we have this, via Planet MySQL. The question though is, are we as Sun, listening to the citizens?
7. The key is the art of figuring out whether & how to apply each of these ideas – John suggests experimenting, trying new things, and then measuring the reaction.

Of course, back to point #6, engaged citizens are noisy is highly true. But the old adage of people complaining because they care, is probably a good thing to remember. Expect noise, demands, threats, contradictions, and more. You can’t please everyone in a healthy community, but they will help you make decisions.

A most interesting presentation, and there’s a lot to learn from Mozilla, for other communities to apply.

Executive summary: There is now a MySQL Room on FriendFeed, as well as a identi.ca group for mysql. Community members, developers, dabblers, users, etc. should find these extra avenues useful, in addition to the forums, mailing lists, and even the Forge. Join them now!

There has been a recent uptake of Twitter amongst the MySQL community… Early adopters have been around for ages, even (as we’re slowly approaching Twitter’s third birthday).

However, I’ve been noticing that slowly, there’s a little shift of the technical crowd, to identi.ca. I’ve had an account there for a while, but never really use the service much – but they’ve had updates this past week. They have group support now.

To post to the mysql group, just say:

!mysql message

The order doesn’t matter. Just have !mysql, in the body of your message. It reminds me of #hashtags on Twitter.

I don’t know how many pay attention to FriendFeed, but there is also a MySQL Room on FriendFeed. I think its a lot more discussion friendly than identi.ca, and would like to see it used more. We always during the Conference & Expo tend to use IRC, but maybe now, we’ll use FriendFeed. Good archives, good conversation, good tracking (one can use twhirl – an Adobe AIR app), I see it as a big win.

All in all, Twitter seems like the .com boom of the early 90’s, when businesses discovered Usenet, however identi.ca seem like those private lists, where the cool kids from Usenet migrated to.

Look at the pitches these articles give. Tell me if you get different messages from them.

The Star says Govt has stopped paying petrol subsidies: Shahrir and The Malaysian Insider says Malaysians are now paying petrol tax.

The Malaysian Insider has 28 comments at the time of this writing… Interactivity. Something traditional media should look into?

To remember in the future:

“After the station operators take their margin of 12.1sen and the oil companies take their margin of 19.1sen, we are left with RM1.69 from RM2.

“If the refinery price is RM1.30 per litre for example, the Government will be taking 39sen per litre as revenue.”

PickupPal
PickupPal is an interesting concept. Its a web tool to connect drivers and passengers, to help carpool, in various towns, all around the world. This is something I wish I’d known about had I been in Melbourne. I of course only found out about it, thanks to the city of Ontario being silly, and fining them for unregulated transportation. I say fair game for all – this is like hitchhiking 2.0? Good way to make new friends, and I’m guessing it’ll work well, if you already enjoy things like CouchSurfing, for example.

Ordering pizza from Facebook?
Ordering Pizza Hut From Your Facebook Page? It’s on the Way is an interesting read. To know that Pizza Hut crossed $1 billion in online sales in the last 18 months is valuable – to know that now you’re going to do it from your possibly favourite website, with a viral widget, is even more valuable.

Imagine you ordering a pizza, it updating your Facebook status, and another bored friend isn’t sure what to eat in another timezone, and decides to order a pizza. Highly plausible.

Ordering via text/phone[web] (they seem to focus on the iPhone), also makes a lot of sense. Cuts out the need to speak to a human. Cuts out the waiting time.

Artist scatters a thousand of his paintings around London
A great social experiment? Adam Neate left a thousand of his paintings around London, for anyone to pick up. Some people are finding them and placing them on eBay, raking in up to £1,000. And Adam is happy about it – it’ll help people during the upcoming Christmas season.

Radar and Apple
Apple’s bug tracking system is called Radar. Its been notoriously kept closed, unlike most open source projects have. Read more about Open Radar, check out the Google App.

As technology enables people to do more, and more, companies previously setting up virtual roadblocks, will face competition from the community. A lesson to learn.