Drawing SD Tweetup newbies and veterans alike, the event further cements the notion that social media can be used for good, and that to further build and cultivate online relationships, we need reinforce our connections face to face. As our group continues to grow, I’m inspired by the positive response of event attendees, and the ensuing response of 140 character exchanges on Twitter.

None of this would have been possible without the support of Network Velocity and Wine Cabana. Network Velocity provides comprehensive IT Support Services, Application Hosting and CIO level strategy and guidance. Their experts provide worry-free solutions that streamline your business processes, improve your bottom line and reduce IT headaches. I highly recommend that you chat with Stuart Hall to learn more the company and their offerings.

As for Wine Cabana, I guess the secret’s out about my favorite San Diego wine bar. Plus, the venue just looks absolutely phenomenal in the photos, as you can see for yourself.

Make sure to send some love to our assistant organizer, and purveyor of Rock Band Rob Marlbrough, as well as the Twitter wall gurus Declan Fleming and Gabriel Lawrence. Without the three of them, our event would have lacked the swagger of Rock Band and the popularity of a Twitter trending topic — we were #2 for hours and that just plain rocks.

Rockin’ Highlights

Below are a few of my favorite photo highlights from the event — they speak for the event better than I ever could (with words). Definitely take a look at Declan’s photos, Jimmy’s pics, Richie’s set, and Angie’s Facebook set. If you know of additional images or videos, leave a comment with a link and I’ll update the post.

*photo courtesy of @jimmyweee

*photo courtesy of @aaswartz

*photo courtesy of @declan

Twitter Roll

I encourage everyone to continue to stay connected on Twitter or via the Facebook group, and I’ve included all the attendees, who signed in, in the spreadsheet below to make it a little easier to keep in touch. If your name is not on the list, but you did attend, please leave a comment with your info and I’ll update the spreadsheet. Also leave a comment if there are any errors with your name, Twitter name, or website, and I’ll make updates as soon as possible.

See you all again very soon!

Got a nagging question? Experiencing technical difficulty with your phone? Yeah you could visit the Help and FAQ sections for your device, or check out Yahoo Answers, but the best way to find what your looking for is to ask the Twitter community for help. Chances are one of your connections either knows the answer, or knows where you can find it. It’s a painless, search-free way to finding what you need.

Don’t believe me? I ask for help ALL the time and I’ve yet to be disappointed. Here are two recent examples of Q&A tweets.

Q. Where can I find a Wii?

Problem: Yesterday was my brother’s birthday (he turned 24), and my mother wanted to buy him a Wii. She turned to me because she expects me to have a pulse on technology and consumer products. I, however, turned to Twitter, my web/tech cheat sheet. You guys, all of you out there who have purchased a Wii, know better than me where I can find one and where I can save a few bucks.

Total Tweets in Response: 18

Solution: I called my mom, passed along the knowledge that was passed on to me, and let her do the rest of the dirty work.

Q. What blogs should I read?

Problem: I’m bored. I read the same blogs everyday and I need a little variety. Instead of searching for new blogs, I turned to you. You happen to have more interesting and diverse tastes than me, so I assumed that you’d be happy to share them with me.

Total Tweets in Response: 15

Solution: My Saturday morning was salvaged from mundane blog reading, I have few new additions to the reader, and I really feel like my eyes have been opened to newer and better realms of the blogosphere.

Test it out yourself. Ask a question and see what happens. Chances are that if you have a smaller audience, you may not get as many responses, but you can always direct your question (with an @reply) to someone with a larger audience to see if they can point you in the right direction or retweet the question to their Twitter network.

KPBS Dressing Room

As you all know, I organize the San Diego Tweetup, and we just keep getting bigger and bigger. This time around we’re going to Make News in a 140 Characters or Less at KPBS Television Studios on the SDSU Campus this Friday at 7:30pm. We’ve got over 200 people RSVP’d to event, a really awesome setup worked out, a first class DJ, and some really awesome sponsors.

The Event – Make News in a 140 Characters or Less

• Date: 11/14
• Time: 7:30pm
• Where: KPBS Television Studips (SDSU campus)
• RSVP/event info: http://www.meetup.com/sdtweetup/calendar/8962054/
• Details – KPBS (@kpbsnews) is graciously hosting SDTweetup for a new media/twitter networking and social event (aka Twitter party). There will be a DJ, food/beverages (snacks, wine, soda), green screen photo opp area, Wii setup, and of course the return of the TwitterBoard (thanks to @gebl), which will display both twitpic photos and tweets tagged with #sdtweetup. In case you missed it, last time we were the #1 trending topic on Twitter for 2 hours. Let’s do it again!

Meet our DJ – Chris Cantore

According to the bio on his site, Chris Cantore (@chriscantore)…

…is a prematurely graying, surf-loving, music enthusiast with fifteen years of multimedia experience (radio/TV/print/online.) Best known as the host of 91X/San Diego’s morning show for eleven years, today, Chris is the founder of CANTORE CREATIVE.

CANTORE CREATIVE produces and distributes online content (HD videos/blogs/podcasts) for your business, event, brand, non-profit, etc. Clients include: Del Mar Race Track. World Talk Radio. The Haunted Hotel. Surfrider Foundation.

Our Fabulous Sponsors – Show Them Some Twitter Love

Greenwala (@greenwala)

Coming soon! Greenwala is a brand new social community where you can learn and brag about being green, read articles, write blogs, post classifieds, enter, vote and participate in campaigns, and more. It’s a place to share your green stories with friends and family as we all do our part to move our planet toward a greener and more sustainable future. We’ll be adding new features and functionality over the next couple months so we’d love to hear your feedback. The site is written in Merb — which will help to keep the on site experience clean, fast, user-friendly, and even use less energy.

We are currently in secret alpha stage today, but we are launching our beta site in just a few days (Nov. 18). You can sign up to receive an email invite to the launch on our blog at Greenwala.com.

WebWizards.net (@Web_Wizards)

WebWizards.net offers a wide range of web services, specializing in high-speed boutique web hosting geared towards blogs, content management systems (CMS), customer relationship management systems (CRM), and e-commerce. Web designers can take advantage of the tiered reseller system, where custom plans and automated billing allow for complete control over client accounts, all through a privately branded customizable control panel. WebWizards.net also has an affiliate program allowing customers to earn 25% lifetime residual commissions on referrals. In business since 1997 and accredited with the Better Business Bureau since 2003, WebWizards.net is the one-stop solution for any web site need you may have.

Rob Marlbrough (@downtownrob), Founder and CEO, is offering a 60 day free trial, no billing information required at sign up, with 500MB disk space and 5GB bandwidth to play with. Visit http://www.webwizards.net/twitter for more info. After the free trial, users can continue service on this special plan for $9/month or switch to any of the other regular plans, starting as low as $6/month. Additionally, WebWizards.net is offering a 15% discount to new customers using this promo code during sign-up: TWITTERVIP.

iList (@iListhq)

iList is a free social classifieds service with an emphasis upon ease of use, openness, authenticity and clean design. iList lets you use the power of your social networks to spread your listing quickly, giving you the ability to cross-post your listings to common services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Craigslist and more. Also, listers on iList use their social network accounts or mobile phones to reinforce their authenticity, avoiding spammers that plague other classifieds systems. If you’re a developer geek, we’re avid supporters of data portability — we have a full, REST-ful Developer API that developers can use to interact with iList data. Both pushing and pulling of data is currently supported, and you can learn more about our API at http://ilist.com/api.

Follow us at @@iListhq, and say hi at the SDTweetup this Friday. Our marketing director, Brad Seraphin (@bradseraphin), will be there with a few other iListers. We look forward to seeing you there!

Learn more about iList at http://ilist.com/tour.

1. Sign up with Notify.me. They’re in private beta, but Wieland gave me this link to share with StartupSD readers and you.

2. Go to the Account tab and select “Destinations.” Follow the steps to configure IM as a desitination.

3. Use FreeMyFeed to get an RSS feed for your Twitter updates. Enter – http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss into the feed url text box. Also enter your Twitter username and password.

4. Copy the output URL.

5. Navigate back to Notify.me and select “Sources” from the Account options.

6. Paste the URL in the Feed textbox and click “Add Feed.”

If you do nothing else, you’ll receive all your Twitter friends’ updates via IM, but if you’d like to filter the tweets you receive you can either exclude keywords (like twitter usernames) or include keywords (like jbruin, sdtweetup, and “san diego” to track a filtered subset of tweets. It works really well and it’s about 1 – 2 minutes faster per notification than the TwitterSpy/GoogleTalk work around. So go have fun!

In the spirit of unpleasant openness, however, Qwitter is born, a site that emails you when someone unfollows you on twitter. They’ll also send the tweet that immediately preceded the unfollow. Demand seems to be in favor of the service, this post says that Qwitter received 300+ signups in the first 25 minutes, but what will the fall out be? I’d personally rather not know. Regardless of what people may say, there will almost always be an emotional reaction when someone receives an email letting them know that they have been unfollowed. Maybe that emotional reaction leads to unfollowing the other person, censored tweets, or hateful tweets, but it’s a little more drama than I want from the one social network that gives me so much in terms of information, networking, and influence.

Just because the information is available doesn’t mean it should be used. I haven’t wanted to sign up for Qwitter, but there’s a detail that seems to be curious. The site says “Just tell us the Twitter username you want to track…”, so does this mean that I can track who unfollows any Twitter user my heart desires? I would hope this isn’t so, but I entered my Twitter name (jbruin) and a different email address than I registered with Twitter, and the process seemed to work just fine. That’s a little scary. Do I really want anyone to be able to track who is unfollowing me and why? Not so much.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to live in a social media world of denied friend requests. That’s just a little more information than I need.

Update: Your Qwitter behavior could become public knowledge, just take a look at this tweet: