Teeth-gnashing and Hand-wringing

Sometimes you just get lucky.Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've no doubt heard about the "platforms vs. developers" flap that's happening recently around Twitter. As luck would have it, Ryan Sarver (the head of Twitter's platform group) was the first keynoter that we confirmed for Gluecon (months ago), and, at Ryan's request, the session will actually be a fireside chat/Q&A time.At this point any reasonable human is wondering why they shouldn't just go to Chirp this week (Twitter's first conference), instead of waiting the month and a half to interact with Ryan at Glue. I think the reason lies in the fact that while Chirp is *all* about Twitter (and their ecosystem), Glue is much more about the larger cloud developer, API ecosystem problem. Glue places "the twitter developer conundrum" in a bigger context. That context relates all of the way out to the whole cloud interoperability, hybrid/public/private cloud debate.And the issues aren't inconsequential. Nor are they, as Brad points out in the link above, historically anything new. True "platforms" are rare and special things. And the network dynamics of a platform ecosystem are probably the single most sought after attribute of a technology company. As such, the space between platforms, or between a platform and an application is fertile ground. Ground that gives life to topics like identity management, API terms of service, SLAs, customer support, standards and protocols, etc. In other words, topics that we'll be covering at Gluecon.So, yes, sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes a controversy springs up about 45 days out from your conference, and you know that after all of the teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing dies down (you know, in like 45 days or so), people are going to have to dig in. And that's where Gluecon comes in. Join us.