Bostonist @ Boston's First Official Google Meetup from Tom Lewis on Vimeo.
Well we were there and we couldn't really believe it happened. As part of a national press tour, evangelists from Google provided an informal meetup at Cambridge's Enormous Room. I was incredulous as I signed up for the event at Meetup.com - "hey wait a minute", I thought, as I entered my info, "this isn't a Google product or portal, WTF?"
As an early arrival at the Enormous Room, I grilled the very helpful staff, "Is Google really doing this thing here? Really? Where's the Google banners? Why aren't there Google slides being projected on the walls? Where's all the branding and handouts?" They gave me some hummus and olives to shut me up.
About a quarter to 7pm, a couple folks from Google showed up and one introduced himself, Nate Tyler (who I later found out did most of the arranging for the event). "Thanks for coming, go get a drink and let's talk". Nate explained that he and his team wanted to meet actual users of their products: webmasters, Search Engine Optimizer/Search Engine Marketing professionals, AdWords advertisers, business owners, and others who were "in-the-trenches" every day, using Google products. "Tomorrow we're meeting with 40+ journalists at the Google offices in Cambridge, which is fine," said Tyler, "but here (at the meetup) we're having real conversations with real people". About 90-100 of these real people showed up!
People who signed up for the event were solicited to provide questions for the team and as a group, using Google Moderator, they voted for the most popular questions in order to get a smaller subset for the team to answer. Google's search evangelist, Adam Lasnik, answered most of the questions, such as Q:"What is Google going to do with regards to Twitter and the Live Web?" (A: Twitter is compellng, Google is working on indexing even more of it, we have a lot of interest in this) and Q:"Chrome for Macs and Linux: when??" (A: We're working on it! Coming Soon!) and at least 20 more questions.
Lasnik also introduced several members from the Google Boston/Cambridge office and explained what technologies were being developed there (no - the Boston Google office is not a sales outpost, they do real development there!). Boston is the development hub of Google's Friend Connect service, as well as Google Book Search as well as contributions to other Google products and services.
There was a great ratio of perhaps 8 to 1 attendees to Google staff so the opportunity to speak to several "Googlers" was very much available. There was plenty of networking going on with all kinds of businesses in the house, including people from TechTarget and Hubspot, just to name-drop a couple.
Many thanks to Nate Tyler and his gang from Google, including Adam Lasnik, Sean Carlson and the very friendly and accessible folks from the local Google office. Also thanks to Alex Howard from SearchCompliance.com, Robin from CourseAdvisor.com, and Chris O'Donnell from Byki.com / Transparent who let me perhaps permanently blind them with my camera light.
We hope Google can come back to Boston and pull off another amazingly intimate event like this again.
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