Sounds great! Wish I could have made the first one but I missed it. I will be attending this one on the 18th for sure; and I'm very interested to learn about anyone's experiences with the CloudFront CDN service. See you there.

Sounds sweet. I may end up working on my hack idea of using Gnip to pump some Twitter event streams into a HiveLive community for an existing customer proof of concept.

http://blog.gnipcentral.com/2008/12/19/numbers-ar...

Cool idea and I'm really looking forward to it!

Ian I think you are spot on. Consider the point of view of a community platform, when I start building user groups, community content, etc., etc. I want the app to make this super easy for me as I'm learning the ropes. Give me patterns of interactions: create a user group from a pattern of providing customer support, create a blog from a generic blog pattern, etc. But then as I become a more experienced user give me additional options and make advanced features available to me. Pay attention to the content and user groups I've created in the past to help make the work flows simpler: do you want to change the structure of what a blog post is for your blog? (give me the choice of using a custom blog data structure I've created before), do you want to setup special rules for managing content within your customer support group? (give me suggestions of how others in the community have done this or even suggest rules I've customized in the past), etc.

The other cool thing with this type of approach would be attribution. If I am a very active advanced user within the application and my activities are suggested to others as patterns or best practices, then give me credit in some way. Obviously nothing that takes away from the software but something that helps build my reputation and personal brand.

I've found that a great way to scale initially for service based startups is AWS (aws.amazon.com) and RightScale (http://rightscale.com/). AWS is pay for what youu use and RightScale is $500/mnth. That is pretty cheap while you figure out if your idea has traction. If you are able to prove your business, then bringing some of the RightScale tools in house probably makes sense considering the community around AWS. Note that AWS for all processing, storage, queuing capabilities, etc. probably doesn't scale longterm (in some cases it might) but again it is a great way to prove your idea and offload scalability concerns upfront.