Wow, had a great time at the first SF Technorati Users Group (SFTUG) meeting. Many thanks to Niall Kennedy for taking the initiative and setting up the meeting, doing the organizing, and even giving the first (pretty detailed) presentation! We had a pretty good turnout, about 20 people, including a bunch of Technorati folks, and had a great time. Lots of people were interested in Attention.xml, and while Niall didn't cover it in his presentation, it was a good topic of discussion afterwards. Had a good chance to hang out a bit with Kevin Burton from Rojo and Jonas Luster (who btw, has just added Technorati support to Drupal). To be perfectly frank, I'm humbled. It is a wonderful thing to be part in building something greater than yourself, and it is a somewhat surreal experience to go to a users group meeting of a service that you created. I came back home tonight thinking about it , and in my cosmos was a great post from Jason Dowdell discussing the change in user group topics - from programming languages to platforms, now to services and APIs. To quote James:

So now, instead of developers meeting to discuss a specific language of code, they're discussing APIs and the possibilities that lie in those APIs. Do you have any idea what that means? Do you see a pattern emerging? Blogs and APIs accomplish the same thing. The common man may be an expert with a single post or a single application. That's what I call maturing. Yes programming languages and their progression is critical but they're becoming more and more robust. Allowing smaller and smaller companies to create APIs and benefit from their loyal user communities to get ideas for features and enhancements. That's going to be the secret sauce of data-centric startups now and possibly for good.

Great points, food for thought. My brain is swimming.