Raquel and I came to San Francisco for a couple of days during this week, mainly to attend the MySpace DevJam. It was a great experience to get to know the west coast as we hadn't have the chance to come over. We also had the opportunity to meet with my great friend Marco Manzo, who is working for Leap Frog in the Bay Area.

On the MySpace side, I'm glad to see that some real and good improvements are being made to open the platform as much as possible. I think this is crucial to them, in order to re-gain the market that they have been losing over to Facebook. They are making great effort by following the Open Social 0.8 spec and working together for the upcoming 0.9 release. Offerpal is also doing good, with an attractive business model for virtual economy. Props to them who organized the little get-together. Also, it's going to be interesting to see how things go with the newly introduced OpenSocial markup language (OSML) and its integration into the MySpace platform. Some of the new interesting features are also notifications and the activities report. I'm looking forward to toy around with it later.

Anyway, we didn't tour that much of San Francisco, since we were also working most of Thursday and Friday. We visited the Mission district, which feels a little bit like the hood I was probably supposed to grow up into, but never did. It feels a little bit like the multicultural harmonic Mexico that we all would like to have, it really makes a lot of sense why a lot of Mexican people come either legally or illegally to these towns. I also bought some bread on a Mexican bakery, had tortas and ate a bit of jícama con chile on a fruit stand; most of the people is friendly, unlike real Mexico We also went to the Golden Gate bridge, which is an amazing piece of technology, it's just amazing. Pictures will be uploaded to our Flickr photostream.

Finally, I'd like to point at how amazed I am right now. I'm currently sitting on a plane, but I'm not saving this blog post to publish it later, I'm fucking online on-flight! This is amazingly possible thanks to Gogo, which is a company that it's enabling these services for some American Airlines flights, and other airlines apparently (see their Wikipedia page too). Apparently, they have some sort of land towers where they send some kind of signal to only some equipped planes. And it's quite cheap, 12 or 13 bucks for the service; given that this is a 6-hr flight, it's totally worth it. If your laptop's battery dies, you can still use your portable handheld device or other computer even. The speed? It's pretty shitty on upload, but it's decent on download, it just kinds of reminds me of a regular aDSL connection in Mexico. I just wish planes would give people the ability to plug themselves into electricity, that'd kick ass too.

Whoops, a bit of turbulence now