This event, which has been organised at the last moment, did in fact have a great response. We were between 25 and 30 people in a nice bar in Paris that Francois found. The bar had free wifi (really good bandwith) and 2 projectors that we used for the presentations.

First thing we did was in fact to eat, since at the conference nothing was bigger than my thumb. While we were eating we all started to be San Fransocial meaning that instead of chatting face to face, we used the laptops to check emails and to keep in touch with our friends who were not physically there. Of course this term has been invented by a member of the San Francisco crew, Chris Messina, which was with us.

Tara started the demo sessions by showing us Riya which is a face recognition tool. You can send the pictures that you have on your harddrive and the software will locate everything which looks like a face or text in it. You can then start giving names to thoses faces and the software is abble to tag automatically the remaining pictures. Of course you have full control of the process and if some mistakes occurs (it can of course always happen, nobody’s perfect) it’s really easy to correct.
Tara gave a really good presentation and seeing her using the software which is still in “buggy alpha” stage I can say that this is a great tool. To be honest I saw absolutely no bug during the presentation but once all of them will be solved we will have a killer application.
I now have an alpha account and will post soon my own experience with the tool.

Chris Messina, Director of Experience and Open Source Ambassador at Flock, gave us then a demo of their navigator. Some of us are already using it but it’s always a pleasure to see Chris sharing his experience and putting such energy into building a really nice social browser. Flock allows you to blog directly from within the browser, to synchronize your bookmarks with del.icio.us and to explore your flickr account in order to quickly add pictures into your posts.
Chris showed us some amazing features which will soon be integrated like a brand new Flickr explorer for instance.
I’m really exited to have the new version of Flock in order to play with those new features…

To finish, Benjamin Bejbaum from Dailymotion gave us a quick demo of his online video sharing tool. It was amazing. I didn’t know that such a tool did exist and that a french team was behind it. To see by yourself don’t hesitate to watch the videos he took during the evening. He almost uploaded them as soon as they were shot and a farm of server is encoding them to Quicktime, Windows Media Video and Flash. You can then watch them on Dailymotion or add them onto your own blog and all of this is free.
(Personnal note to Benjamin: Man, you’ll have to stop using ecstasy pills while doing presentations )

Francois from Blogmarks, who was the first one to suggest that having a BarCamp in Paris would be a really great idea, didn’t gave a demo but showed us directly on his laptop some teasings of the new features he’s working on. (Bonus: here’s the presentation he didn’t do. Enjoy!)

The next step will now be to organise a true BarCamp in Paris. When? Where? At the moment we don’t know but we will work on it on 2006. If you have some nice ideas don’t hesitate to add comments.
Ben Metcalfe who was with us also suggested to have a BarCamp in London which I believe would be amazing.

Stay all tuned for more information about all of this…

More info: The official wiki page…