As I recently moved to London to finish my Master thesis, I had to leave my entire network of friends behind. I used the first couple of weeks to find a room and settle down, but after that I wanted to get to know some people here. Unfortunately there was no-one really interesting to talk to at Imperial College as I do educational software and the rest of the department is into Visual Image Processing.

Lucky for me I was able to attend BarCampLondon2 in the beginning of February. It was my first BarCamp and the experience was brilliant. I was amazed of the quality of most of the presentations and met quite some nice people. This was when I noticed that all these social web tools available these days make it really easy to network. So the next thing I went to was the GirlGeekDinner (with Melinda) at which I again met some new people.

At this moment, I use a few tools to get around in London, and it wouldn’t have been this easy without them. Here are some of the tools I use:

• Upcoming feed for London in iCal for finding interesting events
• Twitter to stay in touch with people I met at BarCampLondon2
  • Tip: Direct mobile messages with Twitter can actually serve as a free SMS provider
• Plazes to find open hotspots and locations that attract people

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 14:11 and is filed under London, event, productivity, university.