I was warned by my brother a while ago that should I start tweeting, he would stage an intervention. I had already confessed to accounts with facebook, multiply, myspace, and several others (disclaimer/explanation: all of those sites are customers of my longtime employer). Twitter, to the uninitiated, looks like the crack cocaine of social networking that turns the weekend photo-poster into a hardcore jittering lifecaster. Nobody wants to see their family member come to that, right? But follow along, twitter has purpose. Or just skip to the bottom.

 I was never an active friendster user. The first site I used …

I was warned by my brother a while ago that should I start tweeting, he would stage an intervention. I had already confessed to accounts with facebook, multiply, myspace, and several others (disclaimer/explanation: all of those sites are customers of my longtime employer). Twitter, to the uninitiated, looks like the crack cocaine of social networking that turns the weekend photo-poster into a hardcore jittering lifecaster. Nobody wants to see their family member come to that, right? But follow along, twitter has purpose. Or just skip to the bottom.

 I was never an active friendster user. The first site I used …

I was warned by my brother a while ago that should I start tweeting, he would stage an intervention. I had already confessed to accounts with facebook, multiply, myspace, and several others (disclaimer/explanation: all of those sites are customers of my longtime employer). Twitter, to the uninitiated, looks like the crack cocaine of social networking that turns the weekend photo-poster into a hardcore jittering lifecaster. Nobody wants to see their family member come to that, right? But follow along, twitter has purpose. Or just skip to the bottom.

 I was never an active friendster user. The first site I used …

There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.

Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the time is right for commercialization of Memcached. But what is it, here did it come from, and what are the chances for vendors to rake in serious cash? Here are the details.

What is it?
Pronounced mem-cash-dee, Memcached was originally created by Danga Interactive (the developer of LiveJournal, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2005) to speed up the performance of dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached has become an industry standard for improving the performance of dynamic websites.

The code is available from the …

“… when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” –Tony “Scarface” Montana

In the world of computing, first you get the users, then you get the applications, then you get the power. What do I mean by power? In a word “platform”. If the only way for users to get applications is through you, and the only way for application developers to get to users is through you, then you are a platform. If you continue to nurture and grow your platform, your company is immortal, it is a goose that will continue to lay golden eggs…as long as you continue to nurture it.

To get the users, you need to deliver immediate value. Once you achieve critical mass of users, the developers will start showing up, whether you want them or not. A good example of this was Myspace. They attracted so many users, that developers started providing extensions directly to users without Myspace’s …

Several people commented on our last blog post or contacted us via our Twitter account, asking questions and raising concerns about migrating the MySQL user group organization to FaceBook. It seems like there is some confusion that we would like to address: you are not required to move to FaceBook. This was just a recommendation, you are of course free to choose whatever service you prefer to manage your MySQL user group. In fact, you are of course welcome to continue using Meetup.com for this! However, be advised that you will have to take care of any occurring fees by yourself from now on, as the sponsorship agreement between MySQL and Meetup.com was not renewed.

And if Facebook is not your cup of tea, there are other services that provide similar functionality. We've tried …

We’ve had MySQL meetup’s organised thanks to mysql.meetup.com for years now, and its sad to see the relationship end in about a fortnight. Never fret, because it seems that Facebook can do all that, and more.

Migration

If you’re the meetup organiser, and you checked the Members list, or even attempted to download it, you’ll be disappointed. You get a CSV file, with the name of the person, some other metadata, if they’re on the mailing list (chances is yes to all), and the URL of the member profile. What’s missing? An email address.

So while its nice to have a CSV copy of the member list, it will not assist you in any migration, whatsoever. Totally data lock in :-(

Mailing list/message board

Keep in mind that you’ve got mailing lists and message boards on meetup.com. You’ll want to make use of this, to tell people to join your new Facebook group. Mailing lists are of the form: …

Background

For several years, MySQL User Groups have been organizing their meetings with Meetup.com, a service that simplifies event management. However, MySQL User group organizers received a surprise message from Meetup.com a few days ago.

We were all taken by surprise by Meetup's sudden announcement and allegation that MySQL "did not want to sponsor" the users groups, because there is a valid agreement between MySQL and meetup.com. The agreement is still in effect, ending on June 10, 2009.

Apparently, there was some miscommunication inside Meetup.com, because the group organizers received a message stating that they should now pay for meetup services, which they used to get for free, thanks to MySQL sponsorship.

It took us a few days to track the origin of the misunderstanding, and when we …

One of the best keynotes at this year's MySQL Conference & Expo was a panel session led by Kaj Arnö, MySQL's vice president of community relations.

read more

Having written about what I think is cool about the upcoming MySQL Conference and the MySQL Camp, now I want to finish up with what I’d like to see at the Percona Performance Conference. Just to recap, this is a conference we created to serve those who want to learn about performance — not “learn about MySQL,” not “learn about database performance,” just learn about performance, period.

I want to see everything. I think this is going to be the single best conference I’ve ever been to. Even the way the conference is organized is exciting. For example, it’s running from early morning till late at night, nonstop. The sessions are also (mostly) only 25 minutes. This means if you decide a session isn’t all that interesting, you didn’t spend much time on it, and you don’t have long to wait for the next one.

So here is a small sample of the …