Code, the Universe and Everything.

Almost a week ago, my colleague Vladimir and I launched a an agile 2008 room on friendfeed. I wrote about the experiment in a previous post. In this post, I’ll describe our viral campaign and preliminary observations so far.

Some stats
First of, some statistics: on Monday, the room had 31 members, the number of posts was above 50, including shared items, comments, pictures from flickr. Mind that these stats are gathered on a moment the actual conference wasn’t even started. Among the items posted in the room were (shameless) plugs of sessions, messages about where to eat Belgian food and a bit of thought sharing on which sessions to attend.

A mini viral campain to get traction
A room without members is nothing, so the first thing we needed to do was get people to actually join the room and participate.
Vladimir and I started a mini viral campaign to do that.Some of the things we did where:

• Post a message on mailing lists, like the lean software development, the scrum and the Belgian xp mailing lists
• For a long time, I’m subscribed to the rss feed from agileplanet.org. I commented on a couple of posts that were about agile 2008, mentioning the room.
• A bit of mailing to personal contacts that I knew were going there.

So far, we managed to indeed spread the virus, albeit very moderate. We also saw others mentioning the room, thus spreading the message more. A big thanks for doing so! I am curious to see how the use of the friendfeed room will evolve over the course of the conference. And more important, I’m very interested to see if the room can capture some of the discussions/feedback/insights, etc that will no doubt occur during the conference. What else would you do to give the room more visibility? Did we forget to do some obvious steps? Any feedback is appreciated.

Screenshots
To close of this post, some screenshots of the room, as it was on Monday noon Belgian time.

Promotion of sessions.

Members of the room.

During the next few days, I will try to post more observations, insights and whatever I can think of for our little room.

Next week is Agile 2008. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to go. But a couple of people I know are going. So, in order not to miss too much of the fun, I will be monitoring the Agile 2008 FriendFeed room.

I have to admit, I’m becoming a FriendFeed addict. I find myself using the service a lot and I’m curious to see how it will evolve. What I find most interesting on FriendFeed is the concept of rooms they have there. At work, we started using a private room of our own, where we post ideas, share little snippets, etc… Some of my team members were already using delicious, where we agreed on a common tag that is only used by our team, and that works. But having the ability to comment, like, etc on the things you share, gives IMHO a much richer experience. Using FriendFeeds imaginary friends, we actually “source in” the stuff we tag on delicious into our private room for work. The only gotcha there is to not use the delicious sharing feature of FriendFeed, but rather the “blog” feature of FriendFeed, and set it up so that it reads the rss feed from your specific tag.

So, to come back to the original topic of this post, I am very excited to see whether enough people will join and participate on the the Agile 2008 FriendFeed room room, and that it will give me, someone who is not participating in agile 2008, enough information so that I at least get a serious idea of what I am missing.

**edit** If you happen to know existing agile 2008 related forums, mailing lists, groups, etc, please let me know about them, or better, spread the word about this FriendFeed group.