I attended the Web 2.0 Mapping Meetup last night. It is really a great venue for the hottest Web 2.0 Mapping companies to present their latest and greatest. For proof of this, Geogad presented its latest benefit to travelers, its ability to mix and match content so that travelers can build their own custom tours.

But last night’s companies were a little weak for my tastes. One of the companies has given virtually the same presentation at Location 2.0 a week or so before. Another company was Yahoo presenting FireEagle. The problem is that I had seen the FireEagle presentation at the beginning of the summer. The only new piece to their presentation was a partnership that they had with a mobile hardware vendor. This vendor sold a wireless communication device that you could use to precisely give you position to fire and rescue if you were hiking in a remote area and needed help. Nice but of limited value to city people. I had really expected to see more progress from FireEagle after all these months. The problem is mentioned as a feature by the speaker. Yahoo created FireEagle for third party developers to create value for this product. Companies see no reason to pay their own people to develop this value themselves.

The only company that had anything new was Abaqus. With their service you can post your geotrack logs to the web. You can also include text, photos and videos. The only problem was that there was no clear revenue stream. It is an interesting service, but I cannot imagine that I would ever personally have a need for this much info on my movements. It may be more compelling for companies that need to keep track of employees. But I still can’t see why such a company would want to post this information to the web.

I am still buzzed about the Web 2.0 Mapping meeting last night. As regular readers of this blog know, Geogad was speaking there last night. There was a lot of energy in the room, and Geogad’s talk went well. Part of that may have been from the talk and part from the free Togo’s sandwiches available.

For those of you who were not able to attend, the slides from the talk as well as a professionally shot video will be available soon. The link will be posted on the Geogad site to help you find it.

Quite a few people had signed up for the meeting, but some were unable to attend because they had switched the event location. While the Web 2.0 Mapping meetings will all be held at Google through the rest of the year, they will be held in different locations each time. It really puts your mapping skills to the test, but it is confusing. Last month, I was 45 minutes late because I got rerouted through the adjacent Shoreline Amphitheater due to a Jonas Brothers concert. For this month’s meeting, the main Googleplex was packed for a Google Dance. Since that was the location for the last meeting, I am sure that many people saw the traffic there and assumed it was still in the same location.

Thanks to the free mapping APIs from big companies like Google and Yahoo, smaller companies and individual developers are able to mash up maps to information in ways not possible before. Previously if you wanted to use high quality maps on your web site, you might be force to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to companies like ESRI or Navteq to get access to their mapping data.

This ability to link maps with new applications is really growing. One of the best signs is the membership of free Meetup groups like the Web 2.0 Mapping group. I attended my first meeting last month and was very impressed by the number of people in the room. It was literally standing room only. The meeting leaders were expecting 40 people and over 80 showed!

This group is growing fast, and I hoping that the meeting next Tuesday, Aug. 19, will be even more packed. Why? Because Geogad has been selected as one of the companies that will present. It should be a really great meeting. Not only is Geogad presenting but so is Geotrax and Loopt, which has been a really hot startup in the mobile social networking space.

Be sure and join us at Google next week. But come early since over 70 people have already confirmed that they will be at the event.

Last night’s meeting of the Web 2.0 Mapping Meetup at Google focused on two great things that go great together: Web 2.0 user collaboration and mapping software. The speakers and their mapping/adventure travel content solutions were all over the map. On one side was the REI solution. REI is a billion dollar company or co-op (depending on your point of view) that has been around since 1938 and has almost 100 stores. Their solution was a work in progress. The speaker was really still figuring out what directions to take it and was looking for feedback from the audience.

On the other side was Eye-Fi, a 20-person that produced location smart cards that could be put into any camera and send the geo-tagged photo via wifi to a network storage like Flickr.

In the middle was KQED Quest, a local PBS station that is looking to geotag all of their content and make it available on the web. Many of the major pieces of their site are together, but many more are still in the works.

I attended a talk given by Dave Nielsen entitled “Marketing to Web 2.0 Developers” at the Marketing SIG of SD Forum. I spoke to another CEO of a widget making startup, so the crowd was interested in the topic. But the talk was more a disconnect with what the crowd was expecting.

Dave Nielsen is best known as the author of PayPal Hacks, a great book if you want to use any of PayPal’s more advanced features on your site. The info in his talk was at too high a level for most people. That CEO that I mentioned above left the talk early. It just did not give him the practical info that he wanted. The talk was spent mainly defining terms. Ironically, the speaker did not even mention Web 2.0 until the last 10-15 minutes of the talk. Mostly it was ancient history. In Nielsen’s defense, ancient history for the Internet is last year, and his audience was a mix of technical and non-technical people.

The biggest issue that I had with his talk was his definition of “developer”. Nielsen defined developer very broadly as anyone who uses an interface to customize something. Our biggest disagreement is that he seemed to use “developer” interchangeably with “early adopters”. By this definition, the first users of YouTube to upload and share videos with their friends were developers because they “created” their own YouTube page with the YouTube interface and spread the gospel of YouTube to their less technically sophisticated friends.

In my point of view, such early adopters are your first customers who are using the product that your engineers designed in the way that it was designed to be used. They are customizing the product to their wants into something that has not been produced before, but they are not developers. I would think that a better word than developer might be content creator since that is what these customers are really producing that is unique.

On the other hand, I do believe that a person that creates a new widget or app for Facebook is a similar site is a developer. While they are using an interface developed by, for example, Facebook engineers for third parties to develop apps on Facebook, these new apps really are like new programs being built in the “Facebook programming language and interface.”