Thursday was geeks' night out, with the Michigan Google Technology User Group sponsoring an event at the Ann Arbor Google office. Here's a writeup of what I heard and saw.

Who

Pamela Fox from Google was the presenter at the event. She is based in Google's Sydney, Australia, office, and her job involves helping people learn Google's APIs. Part of this includes the role known in the industry as "technology evangelist," which involves flying around the country giving talks to user groups. On this trip she had come by air from another talk in another city, and the flight was more than nine hours late, so we started late.

The Michigan Google Technology User Group, organized by Timothy Fisher, was the organizer of the event. They meet regularly in metro Detroit and keep a Google technology events calendar for events in the area.

Dug Song was there in part of his role as the ubiquitous senior geek of a2geeks.org, a collection of local user groups and technology organizations that somehow manages to make sure that a lot of people turn out for tech events.

There were more than 100 people in the room, and the event was officially sold out athough no one was taking tickets at the door. The audience was overwhelmingly male, though not exclusively so, a result not atypical of other tech-focused events I've been at.

What

Pizza was provided for free by the user group from one of their sponsors, who spoke at the beginning of the event.

There are really two ways in my experience to fund an event like this to provide incidental refreshments. One group I have been a member of for a long time has a "pop and cookies" fund where people who show up contribute a dollar, and someone acts as treasurer and goes to their favorite big-box store to haul in enough snacks. The other is with an explicit corporate sponsor who gets credit, time on the agenda, or their name in big letters on t-shirts.

It is very typical of events that seek an audience to provide food. Graduate students, in particular, are often attracted to campus events by the lure of pizza. I continue to look for a calendar which only lists events where there is a free meal involved.

Where

The event was held at the Google offices in Ann Arbor, in a room on the third floor which is less sealed off from the public than most of the office space at that organization. At some events I've attended at this location, there has been a requirement to sign a non-disclosure agreement before entering the building. No NDA was required this time.

The venue had the hallmarks of a stylishly cool company, with the requisite video game collection, colorful bouncy balls, and a fridge with beer. The beer fridge was locked, as were all of the snack fridges.

Google had originally planned to bring 1,000 jobs to Ann Arbor, as part of an incentives package that included parking spaces in the adjacent Liberty Square structure and tax breaks. The venue was clearly not the corporate cafeteria for a 1,000-person company office. The buzz in the room, which was full of engineers, included some measure of sadness that there were not more engineering jobs in the local office.

Why

The technical focus of the talk was originally going to be on Google Wave, an innovative, if at times baffling, piece of technology from Google which allows large-scale interactive collaborative efforts all done through an Internet browser. Wave was cancelled by Google last week, and so the speaker scrapped her slides about Wave and instead talked more broadly and generally about Google APIs.

APIs, or "application programming interfaces," are ways for you to interact with cloud-based Internet services in a relatively clean and standard way so that the focus of your development efforts can be on doing your application and not writing the low-level driver code. They save a lot of time for the developer, and they also save time for the organization supporting a service because they can control which parts of the system are visible to the outside.

The talk

Slides from the talk are available below. They were built using Prezi, an online equivalent to Powerpoint for building slide decks.

Edward Vielmetti geeks out just a little bit for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.