Having missed the last couple of Boston Web Innovators events, I was impressed when I walked into the ballroom to see such a large crowd (200+?) for the 10th meetup. Great to see the expanding interest, and I was particularly pleased to see some students there. Boston obviously has a vibrant student population, but I hadn’t seen many attending past events. I spent much of the evening catching up with some people I hadn’t seen in a while, which was great, but the night went by so quickly that I missed the opportunity to talk to new people. Some quick thoughts on the “main dishes” of the evenings:
- Guild Cafe. A social site for gamers' guilds and clans seems like a rare niche among social sites that actually makes a lot of sense. These are already very active communities, with people who are literally obsessed with games and their groups.
- Goombah. A music recommendation service that tracks your iTunes listening and library to suggest other music and free downloads using Napster. While the service looks nice, I think it will be hard for them to get noticed above Last.fm, Pandora and iLike. Also, among those I talked to, the name "Goombah" seems like a poor choice. Their site explains the name, but in my mind it either reminded me of the little Super Mario Bros. enemy or a slur against Italians.
- MyPunchbowl. Evite needs killing, but it will be a uphill battle for MyPunchbowl. The BostonWTF review of the service does a good job of calling out their strengths and the challenges ahead of them. In the demo Matt Douglas showed some of their nice features, such as the Plaxo integration and actually including the party information in the generated emails. I hope they can break through to get the attention of the very broad market they are hunting. </ul>