- There are some undocumented SSML features that are live today. Upon returning home, I immediately tried them out and confirmed that at least one of them works. Watch for a follow up post on that topic...
- There are some surprisingly good reasons that some of the top-requested features haven't been implemented. A topic that came up in several of my conversations was the question of geolocation, and why we can't know the location of the device triggering the call. Rather than just "because there's no access", everyone I talked to was able to give me a pretty good treatise on the complications of that type of feature, while also assuring me that it's not something they've written off as unsolvable. I'm now less inclined to question the reasoning behind some of these things.
- On the topic of geolocation, I wasn't able to get a direct answer out of anyone on whether Uber or Dominos got special backdoors for location awareness, but it was pretty clear based on the way they spoke around the questions that yes, they did.
- I did, however, learn that they have a program for "managed" partner skills (of which Uber and Dominos are examples). This isn't really surprising, most any large, broad platform is gonna have something like this, but now we have confirmation.
- The certification team definitely works in conjunction with the development teams - they are not an isolated island. I asked this question, and got direct answers that there are people on each team whose job it is to work with the certification org.
- As might be expected, the questions from the attendees mirrored the questions on the forums. Lots of "Why can't we do push notifications?", etc.
- If they keep holding events like this and convincing just a few percent of the attendees to start developing, the platform is going to rapidly balloon...
All things considered, I definitely came away from the event with a good feeling about the direction things are going, both short-term and long-term. I unfortunately didn't get a chance to talk to Charlie or Amir - maybe next time! All in all, though, great event.
Did anyone else have a chance to make it out to the event? What did you think?