We had the May CTO Breakfast today. There was a good group and some great discussion.

I started off by talking about the Utopia install at my house. No one else at the meeting has Utopia yet, so there was some interest in how the install went and how well the service works.

We also got into a discussion of Mozy. Of course, Tyler wasn't here this time, so we couldn't pump him for info. A general discussion of backup methods, drives, and programs ensued. I brought up Fuse, a cool way of building file systems in user space.

A subsequent discussion of Google Docs led back to Fuse. Amit Signh has a video showing a Fuse file system for Google Docs, as well as Picassa. This is a cool way to put networked services on the desktop.

We talked about Google's hiring process and the problem they have getting smart people to work for them when they have a strike price on their options of $500. Google's actually set up a unique internal market that allows employees to trade vested options to help solve this problem.

Nobody's really happy with their mail clients ecept Phil Burns who loves Outlook. This was part of a bigger discussion on Vista and how it's working. Lars Rasmussen mentioned a post where he talks about his migration.

We talked about a Web site called Weight Loss Wars. The idea and Web site are good, but the discussion was about how many "Web 2.0" features were in it. So, what are Web 2.0 features? Here's the list we worked out.

• Shared data architecture (RSS, blog widgets, etc.)
• Limited page refreshes
• Collaborative interaction
• APIs so that apps can be built on top of it.

And Phil Burns has a weird post about Blake Snow. Ask him about it.