I wrote a post where I mention Gnip as an innovative service, one that can help to increase web services' scalability on one end and to ease building new mashups applications on the other. Consequently, I was invited by Eric Marcoullier Gnip's founder and CEO to meet.

I was excited about this meeting but at the same time very confused. I was only blogging for few months then and I had no idea what to expect. I did not know what kind of hat should I wear when I'll see Eric. On one end I could be a reporter, with a notebook quoting and taking meeting minutes. On the other end I could come to this meeting as a "consultant" (for free) discussing new ideas.  I had no clue.

We met and we talk for an hour but I was still missing the context. I did not took notes and I was probably too nervous because I remember very little from our discussion. I only remember that Eric was very nice and actually have strong roots in MA where I live now. I learned that Gnip is a very young startup but it already did a lot in the short time of its existence. It is changing the way that web services integrate, from the constant, wasteful, chatty data pulling to the scalable and efficient data push. I  learned that the next step for the service/platform  is delivering the actual data along with the event (they are using the publisher subscriber model) then normalizing it for the same entity across multiple web services - a very cool capability. My take: I think that Gnip can become the backbone of the online APIs world. The metaphor is a "smart router". This time not just for packets but for data and metadata. This "router" can be optimized to distribute data fast, reliably, and to eliminate dups. The service can monitor the health and activity across multiple web services (reporting and dashboard). And maybe even help other web services to recover by storing undo and redo logs. There is always the option to mine the data (across multiple data sources) but I'm not sure how much both sides off the track will be happy about it. The questions? whom to charge the fee from? The producer or the consumer? It is too early to answer these question though.

I probably should have consulted someone before meeting Eric so I could come better prepared to the encounter. I'm sure that Chris Brogan has few good tips on how to deal with this kind of situation.

Anyway, what would you do? I guess that it has to do with your personal/blog's objectives. But, I'm still working to define mine.

If this meeting would have happened today I would probably come up with a note book or some other means for capturing the content of the meeting. I would have listen more and talk less (always a good advice ). Yet, I'm still dancing between the two options: consulting and reporting.

I feel bad because of the lost opportunity and time on both sides. I guess that one has to pay some tuition when learning new skills.

So how do you cross to the (off)line? 

What would you expect from a meeting with a founder, CEO, PR rep, other blogger? 

I look  up to the professional bloggers for some insights. For the noobies I can only offer the advice to ask for an advice before you meet.

Picture from Ed Schipul photostream (I think) - thank you.

The Tree House Detectives

 If we do not understand this term fully then a little help from children is in order.

I watch the NASA channel a lot and they have a kids program that I have a great deal of respect for. The Tree House Detectives, is a program aimed at Elementary to Junior High Youth to inspire learning and science development. I have found a wealth of important principals that I need for problem solving.

Here is the NASA website for the program

http://scifiles.larc.nasa.gov/

Here is a explanation of it well done at Science Buddies

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentoring/project_scientific_method.shtml

So you got your HHO cell making gas now how can you make it more efficient.

1. What is it's efficiency?
2. What does research tell me about the result?
3. What part do I change?
4. How does it compare to Michael Faraday?
5. What is taking place chemically for what my result is?
6. Did I write down the variables and outcome of this experiment?
7. Do I need to take a continuing educations class in Physics on Electrical Engineering?

I think this method does in no way quench creativity or inspiration. I wish only for us all to be successful and when the breakthrough comes we can know exactly how it happened and not lose what has been gained.

I have a while to go before I feel that I have experimental data to offer for review, but I hope that I will. This type of work is exciteting and promising but it needs credibility in the data. I like it when the experimenter talks out what they have went thought and describes the results. A standard benchmark to compare results with enough information to duplicate the experiment. That is called "peer review". Laboratory Instrument are so rarely used because of budget constraints. There are ways of making measurements or getting in contact with a high school chemistry teacher who might even want to invole there class. A key that unlocks the door you have been struggling with might only be kept by someone else.

We need to be standing on the shoulders of giants not reinventing the wheel each time. This blog is for me but I hope it encourage you too.

Here is mine:

I think that people will appreciate this service because it is as simple as Twitter, in only few minutes you can setup a page that points to multiple profile pages, your blog, twitter account, email and more.

I found it after reading this article on ReadWriteWeb.

I tried the Random option and found few great MeeIDs. How clear is one's profile presented this way? Just a few line and you can see what this person is active in, and where. I found some great new Twitter accounts to follow using this cool service. The Twitter Bio page is so dry!! Maybe Twitter or Twhirl should think about integration with MeeID (or build a similar solution).

I can also see more use for this service, maybe to explain a product, a place, a term in just few line and links. Maybe to explain some of the opaque #hashtags on Twitter Search Trending topics. Like Twitter the options are limitless.

This could also help solving some of the problems that I wrote about in Piecing Web Presence.

But...

When I tried the search option typing the word John (common name and I just wanted to find someone) this is what that came up.

False John McCain MeeID

So it is too easy to trash someone's ID using MeeID. I guess that having the email verification round trip during the subscription and account activation process is essential (or using OpenID).

I hope that the team at MeeID will fix this soon before they'll end up with a large cleanup task removing spam IDs hence SpID (SpID, like spam and splogs).

I highly recommend using it and I cant wait to see new creative ways for using MeeID profile pages. API?