Last night I attended the first of a series of events related to Google Open Social scheduled for this week in Buenos aires, This first event was labeled as "Open Social for Marketers" and was clearly intended to promote Open Social and social networks among marketers, advertising networks and brand agencies. From my point of view, I would have expected much more from this event, taking into account that Google was taking part of it. I wanted to listen to things most of the audience last night didn't know already. I think most of the attendees might have felt a bit disappointed about the content of the presentations (not to mention the fact that the place, Barhein, didn't have a wifi Internet connection and Patrick Chanezon from Google could not show any live example of Open Social Apps). Maybe it was my fault and I was attending the wrong meeting but I had the chance to talk to many other people last night (and follow some twits recently) and the feeling of disappointment was shared. The intended audience (marketes and agencies) was not present (only a few raised their hands when the CRO of Sonico asked: "how many of you work in marketing agencies?"). Instead, a community of Internet power users and entrepreneurs was there, all anxious to see and listen to somenthing new. But that didn't happened.
The good thing was that I could meet with colleagues and friends I hadn't seen for a couple of weeks since the last Palermo-Valley-related meetings (PVNs and SMUA) and get to know new people. The other good thing about this event was that it made think about how this market is going to evolve in the next years and who the players will be in this game. I think this a game of three: social networks, advertising networks / brand agencies and web2.0-opensource-oriented software development companies. This is a good thing to know and it renforces the road we are following at Zauber with our services offer: agile methodologies, web standards, open source technologies, semantic web, microformats, open id, and many other cool things.
The last good thing about this event is that it gave me a great reason to get back to writing, something I was missing.
