I’ve got the old Edwin Starr song in head today, but with a twist:

“Meetups, huh, yeah

What are the good for?

Absolutely (everything)

Say it again, y’all

I couldn’t help but laugh as I sat humming this tune in Starbucks this morning as I was prepping for tomorrow nights Developer Meetup in San Francisco. This will be our third meetup in the past few months and I took some time to think about what a meetup was good for (thus the jingle, and trip back in memory lane).

If you look at the Wiktionary definition, a meetup is an arranged informal meeting. This is a good start, but if we look at what makes a good technical meetup to me it is about sharing code, demoing/playing with new technology, and perhaps most importantly, networking with your peers. Using this definition, so far the Force.com Developer meetups have been therefore been pretty successful. I have met a bunch of great people, shared a bunch of code, and the team has announced some cool competitions with awesome, shiny prizes (can anyone say IPad?) 

The New York Meetup, in particular was a lot of fun. Thanks to the Chatter Dev Zone, I already knew a bunch of the folks in the audience like Joel Dietz, and Alex Sutherland (Ed, I was looking forward to catching up with you too – keep the Chatter ideas coming!). The result was a fun, open presentation on Chatter code, with a bunch of tangents including some sneak peeks at another Chatter app, Chatter Recommendations, I have been working on in between other things. Perhaps tomorrow at the SF Meetup, we can convince Umit and Dave to demo their latest app—which, btw has a killer use case for Chatter.

If you haven’t tried one of the Force.com meetups, or any of the others (many of which are listed on Meetup.com), especially those related to technology, do yourself a favor and drop in. You won’t be disappointed.

Now, say it again y’all (you know you want to)

“Meetups, huh, yeah

What are the good for?

Absolutely (everything)”