Google I/O 2008: It's a wrap

This is my last posting on the Google I/O developer's conference held last week in San Francisco. Even though the conference was only two days long, I took about 12,000 words of notes and nearly 200 photos so it took a while to sift through. Here are a few closing thoughts.

For some reason this is the most popular photo in my flickr photoset of the conference. And yes, I realize the irony of posting pictures of a Google conference on a Yahoo site, but what can I say, I paid for the flickr Pro account and it works well.

The Moscone West center was a good venue for the conference but it felt a bit cramped. Every session was standing room only. They're now saying over 3000 folks showed up, which was more than Google anticipated. The WiFi system was frequently overloaded, though that's a complaint I have of every conference I've been too lately.

Google employees were everywhere, of course, and they were always courteous and knowledgeable. It was good to put some faces to names I see often on the forums, such as Dan Morrill and Jason Chen, above.

Once again, MacBooks were the #1 choice of conference attendees, followed by Lenovo Thinkpads. You could not escape the friendly Apple logo staring back at you, especially in a darkened room. Whoever put the glowing apple on the back was a genius. Also, kudos to whoever decided to toss bean bags all over the place. Now if there had just been about 10x more power strips...

Of course no retrospective can be complete without a picture of the Flight of the Conchords. They were great. 'nuff said.

Thanks to Google for putting on this developer's conference. Hopefully this will turn into an annual event.

Check out all my other Google I/O 2008 posts here.