I had a blast last weekend in San Francisco. My buddy Noah (and Adam) hosted the second Community Next conference. Luckily I was invited. I’ve put some photos online and my quick thoughts are found below.

VIP Dinner

Friday was the VIP Dinner. I chatted with a bunch of awesome guys including the CTO of Pandora Tom Conrad, Shel Israel, Eric from icanhascheezburger, the MyBlogLog team, the Scrapblog team, Dave McClure, Andrew Chen, and so on.

Pre-Party

Then we hit the pre-party at Old Pro (in Palo Alto). It was a ton of fun (and sponsored by Yahoo! again). I hung out with great folks including the aforementioned plus Poornima from Mint, Shivani from Women2.0, Gabe from Techmeme, and so on and so forth. I was humbled all evening. I also had the pleasure of hanging out with Andre Nosalsky, Scott Hurff and Rob Johnson. They happened to be my roommates for the evening. Thats a story in and of itself.

The Conference

The next morning the conference was at the PlugandPlayTechCenter which was an excellent spot for the conference. It went by a lot faster than the last one. Perhaps that’s because I could actually sit and enjoy it. Which I did. I heard some cool people speak about an awesome area right now: viral marketing. We heard from employee number four at MySpace, icanhascheezburger, hi5, Pownce, Justin.tv, Crazy Egg, Timothy Ferriss, and so on. A lot of Facebook discussion and plenty on what you should and should not do to attract and retain users.

Bottom Line

Another great conference. I enjoyed chatting with everyone there and am still excited by the caliber of the attendees. Like I said, I was lucky to be there. The Community Next conferences have been phenomenal and I look forward to the future (yes, there will be more!).