I attended the NY Tech Meetup on Jan 9th. Some highlights:

ChangingThePresent.org
This is a non-profit that aggregates other non-profits for the purpose of gifting donations to causes in the name of others. It’s one of the stronger non-profit web services I have seen in that they have built a number of features to encourage community growth on their site. For example: users can create wishlists of their favorite causes that other users can view and purchase. Or, my favorite, a hot-or-not-esque hall of shame for all the bad gifts people have received. People rate how bad each other’s bad gifts are, which in turn is supposed to inspire you to give donations instead of bad gifts. They’re thinking social distribution and viral features; I like it.

Platial
The presentation by Platial was definitely a highlight. There has been plenty of blogosphere hype on Platial already, so I’ll be brief. Platial is releasing new features that allow you and your community to collaboratively edit a Platial map outside of the Platial service in the context of your own blog. It works anywhere that javascript can be embedded. I’ll likely experiment with this feature here on The Gong Show in the future; I’m always a fan of decentralized services that allow me to add features/value/content in my own online presense (my blog). It’s more than a widget: based on the demo it appears to be a whole service in the context of another site. Nice!

Daylife
Daylife has already received more buzz than Platial, so I need to keep these comments even shorter. But, this presentation was a highlight for two reasons.

1. Daylife’s UI (on the home site, in the widgets, in the API… everywhere) is remarkably smooth. It’s a very clean. Subtle and helpful rollover effects. Great stuff
2. Everything at Daylife.com can be built using their API today. All the tools, content, widgets, and API used to create daylife.com are publicly available. That’s a level of openness that most startups don’t parallel, and I respect that.

Overall it was the best of the major NY Tech Meetups I have attended.