We’re really happy to be sponsoring BarCamp Madison which is coming up July 26th and 27th. It’s exciting to see these types of activities going on in Madison. For the techno-enthusiasts among us, we know that there is a strong tech community in and around Madison, but one that tends to be fragmented.

There are lots of exciting startups like Networked Insights, NovaShield, Ohigo, Flying Cart in addition to the local Drupal heads and game companies, but the community rarely comes together for geekery like this.

Through the hard work of people like Abraham Williams, Blake Hall, and many others I’m sure; events like BarCamp and Web608 are creating a terrific tech culture in what is already a great city to live in.

Go register today!

In case you missed it, we had a nice write-up from Jeff Richgels in The Capital Times last week.

It was great to see how well Richgels grasped our vision for democratizing the tools for creating software, and explaining it to the readers with a simple example.

Budding game developers, for instance, could create a rocket ship by importing an image and then linking behaviors to the image, such as “when the space bar is pushed, apply a force to the rocket.” Then, another user could create an Asteroids-like game by simply dragging the rocket into a new application.

Hideous picture really. It’s missing Jeff, but I’m beginning to think that he’s the lucky one!

The Game Developer’s Conference is getting started! You can follow our activities this week on Twitter @sharendipity.

More to follow…

The Sharendipity crew is heading to San Francisco for the Game Developer’s Conference during the week of February 18th. We’re looking forward to another great event.

Please let us know if you’ll be there and would like to get together. We’d love to share stories and show off some of the exciting things we’ve been up to.

Inching closer to being totally open… In the fall, we made the decision to transition our initial launch to the Facebook platform. The primary driver for this move was the attractiveness of quickly and cheaply acquiring users. We’re introducing a new way of creating software so any help we can get in recruiting is a plus. We also felt that our vision lines up perfectly with the Facebook audience as they look for new ways to express themselves online and with their friends.

We immediately ported our alpha release to the Facebook platform and began leveraging the viral channels available to spread user activity within Sharendipity. At the same time, we continued to introduce new creation tools, improve stability, and fold user feedback into the client. The next step was to loosen the grip a bit to encourage more adoption of our platform, and provide a real audience for our content creators.

In that spirit… we’ve made some changes to our accessibility on Facebook. As of a few weeks ago, anyone can install Sharendipity and run the applications created by our users (although we’ve still limited access to the creation tools for the time being).

Hopefully this will provide a little more incentive to our early adopters to create new content. We also wanted to start spreading the word on our platform. So if you haven’t done so already, please install Sharendipity and play some of the applications created thus far. There is a mixture of games and slide shows that integrate your Facebook friends. More applications are being added all the time…

We released an alpha version of Sharendipity out into the wild today… This is a big event for us. Over the last several months, we’ve had friends and family play with our creation. The feedback has been very positive. But it isn’t until it gets out into the hands of a diverse group of people that you really begin to learn about your progress.

We’re anxious to get feedback from real consumers. We expect to learn a lot, but we’re also hopeful that our new community will help drive our priorities to make sure we build the right features.

This is a pretty limited release, but we will eventually grow the alpha group as time goes by. If you’d like to be included in this, please drop us a note.