We attended Google Developer Day – Sydney 2008 earlier in the week so thought it’d be good to share some observations / thoughts. When you work in one technology area for awhile it’s good to see what others are doing.
Overall I found the day useful and worthwhile. The conference entry was FREE so it only cost us T&E and our time, which always makes justifying your attendance a lot easier.
There’s a lot of parallels between many of the Google products and the Microsoft offerings e.g.
Google Maps –> Virtual Earth
Google Gadgets/Open Social –> live.com and spaces gadgets
You Tube –> Silverlight
Google Web Toolkit –> Script Sharp
Depth-wise the sessions were a bit lacking, but left lots of time for questions from the crowd.
I found the Google Gadgets/Open Social sessions interesting. The gadgets themselves look VERY similar to the live.com/spaces gadgets. These can be handy for brand awareness etc. and it seems Microsoft isn’t investing effort into this area at the moment it’s good to see what Google is doing. The Open Social side is quite interesting allowing a write once, publish to a bunch of social networks. The big one missing is Facebook, so I guess it’ll be write twice for most people.
The session on You Tube was of interest because they are using ATOMPub for their api, which is cool if you’ve seen the Astoria demos around the place. The session was interesting to see where we would/should use this as opposed to Silverlight Streaming.
The conference was at Wharf 8, which wasn’t a bad venue. There was an issue with you hearing the session next door which could be a bit distracting. The seats were really, really bad.
They had a bunch of bean bags etc. for people to chill on aswell as an xbox, wii and playstation to play with. The food setup was interesting. They had some known companies with a selection of food you could go to e.g. Noodle Box, Pasta, Bakery which i think was a bit simpler/easier than that standard buffet.
There were LOTS of power adapters for people to charge up their lappies and the wireless while sometimes slow, didn’t seem to go down at all. Quite a few people on twitter commenting on various bits and pieces..the usual geeky event.