We're very pleased to announce that, together with the organizers of RubyNation, we debuted our social application "The Social Collective" today as a means for RubyNation conference attendees and other Rubyists to meet and interact with their peers.
This is a very similar codebase to what we deployed at BEA Participate in May, but without ALI or ALBPM. These BEA (now Oracle) products provided a great, scalable and flexible architecture, but we didn't feel it was a good use of our resources (i.e. $$$s) to continue to use these products and we didn't want to pass this cost on to RubyNation, which, BTW, is only charging $175 for two jam-packed days of Ruby awesomeness.
So, for those of you who have been following all this social goodness coming from bdg, there are now two distinct versions of The Social Collective: one that uses BEA/Oracle products and one that does not. This affects pricing (obviously), so if you're interested in either, please contact us to find out more.
And in the meantime, if you're as gung ho about Ruby as we are, sign up for an account and help us grow the Ruby community here in DC and beyond!