[NBLUG/talk] Regarding a recent hackfest I attended

jezra jezra at jezra.net
Mon Nov 19 10:44:08 PST 2012


It sounds to me like they want to spur developer interest in their
stagnating platform. 

Last month (and I should have lightning talked about it), I attended a
Federated Social Web conference in SF, and there, the focus was on
intercommunication of social applications and freeing users from
monolithic data silos by allowing users to install/run/use software
that is decentralized and not dependent upon a single commercial entity
like Facebook or Google. 



On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 01:14:59 -0800
Zack Gold <zack at nblug.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Hope your November is going good so far.
> 
> A thought came to related to the hackfests that I attended in the
> recent months in San Francisco, where I went to, basically, code
> sessions for a big company. One of them was with Facebook at Heroku's
> headquarters. The basic idea behind the event was to build an
> application that would utilize Heroku's resources (they deal with the
> server, you focus on the app), and the best app would win a prize
> (Facebook swag). Though, the event was nice, and all the attendees
> were fed well, I became skeptical about what the event was really all
> about. I mean, here you have two big companies who are inviting the
> public into a free event, they're paying for the A/C power for a
> hundred laptops, they're paying for a rather expensive catered meal
> from some random place in SF (that is actually good quality food),
> and they're giving away free prizes when you build something that
> impresses them. I suppose this is more of a discussion than a
> question that has been troubling me for a while now, and I'm just
> curious what they are trying to benefit from getting people involved.
> For anyone who has been to a hackfest before, what are your thoughts
> on this? Personally, I feel that they're trying to get people
> involved in their APIs and to get people excited about developing
> applications for Facebook (or whatever company is hosting the event),
> but they're also getting feedback on the usability of their API.
> 




More information about the talk mailing list