Google I/O - By Bruno Rovagnati

Finally I can wake up and start fighting the JetLag, yeap, 11AM Arg, but 7AM San Francisco, that beautiful city where i've been working for the last month.

A month full of adventures, challenges and great success, a month dedicated to OpenSocial in all of its flavors.

There will be time in the near future to write about all those things I lived and a bunch of fun anecdotes, such a visiting 100mts tall and 2k year old trees, or be drinking a beer with gopher inventor or having a flight canceled and spent a day in a hyatt in Dallas :D.

But I want to focus on one particular event, an event that made a great kick off for this OpenSocial month in San Francisco, the Google I/O.

It was 9am, May 28th and I was heading to the Moscone Center, http://code.google.com/events/io/location.html, and from some blocks I could see lines and lines of geeks waiting to enter. Hopefully the R-T lines was almost empty, so Rovagnati, Bruno, (a.k.a. me) had to wait just 5 minutes to get the batch, agenda and a nice t-shirt, http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/28/google-gets-fancy-with-google-io-tshirts-too-fancy/, N-P wasnt that lucky, so Nocetti, Nestor had to wait :). The list of speakers was incredible, David Glazer, Alex Martelli, Steve Souders, Dion Almaer, Mark Lucovsky, Guido van Rossum, Jeff Dean, Chris DiBona, Josh Bloch, http://code.google.com/events/io/speakers.html, the bunch of friends I havent seen for months and the new ones i'll make.

The place was incredible, all the scenery super Googly, red, blue, green, yellow all around, tons of foods, drinks, pool tables, puffs, everything to have a great couple of days.

The first session was for all the attendees, around 3.000, in the biggest salon in the Moscone, Vic Gundotra, VP, Engineering, gave the Keynote. There he went though 5 of all the Google APIs. Ajax, Tools, Social, Geo and Mobil. This last one was really good when they show Android running live on a cell phone and when moved using Maps Street view, the phone followed your movements to see around, http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/28/live-from-google-io/.

The sessions, http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions.html, were huge, massive, a lot, and no time to be in all unless I could split, fork or thread myself... Not being possible that, yet, I went to almost all OpenSocial ones, my speciality.

One that I want to emphasize is *Apache Shindig: Make Your Social Site an OpenSocial Container*, by Paul Lindner, Chris Chabot and Dan Peterson, http://sites.google.com/site/io/apache-shindig-make-your-social-site-an-opensocial-container. In this session Shindig was discussed. Shindig, http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/, is the OpenSource implementation of OpenSocial and Globant has a lot to do with this. Not only implementing it in huge social networks, but also developing it. So we where more than happy to be an active part of the event.

The list was endless, http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions.html, lots of topics, lots of new technologies and really nice people.

At noon, as expected, the lunch was awesome. All you thought about and more, mention it, and was there. From hamburgers to fish, from pastas to sushi, and why not a haagen dazs, http://www.haagendazs.com/, as a dessert.

Sessions continued during the afternoon, but I dont want 'to bore' you with that, so i'll jump to the party.

Yes, the party. At the end of the day, the big salon where the keynote was given it was transformed into a big party! Nintendo Wii, Daytona race cars, chocolate fountains with strawberries, Coronas, heinekens, geeky rockbands, http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9955395-7.html. Around 10PM lights started turning on and the crowd was leaving. Exhausted Guibert, Nestor, Patrick Chanezon and myself we were lying in one of the sofas willing to be teletransported to the hotels. Incredible, we spent a really good time.