Affiliate Summit West Kicks Off With Foursquare Foolery

The first night of Affiliate Summit is always an enjoyable one primarily for two reasons. It's the first time you get to re-connect with industry mates you haven't seen in a while and you don't have to get up early the following day because the conference doesn't start until noon.

This year Shawn Collins and Missy Ward, founders of Affiliate Summit, opened registration early at 4PM to those that arrived Saturday could get the whole badge pick up thing out of the way. There will be over 4,000 attendees this year. We took advantage of early registration and scored our badge at 4:05PM. We ran into the wonderful Amy Rodriguez from Affiliate Summit who, along with Shawn and Missy, made our conference visit possible.

After a much-needed nap and registration were out of the way, it was time to visit the iBar in the lobby of the Rio. There, we hung with the buy.at team, Missy Ward and Michelle and Loren Feldman of 1938media fame. Thesis creator Chris Pearson was there as well.

Then it was off to dinner at Buzio's with Michelle and Loren. For most of dinner, we talked about the pros and cons of foursquare. So much so, the two of them, who had been holding out, decided to sign up. Then the fun began. We all engaged in a bit of foursquare fuckery for the fun of it. What, you ask is foursquare fuckery?

If you haven't heard of foursquare, it's a service and a game that let's you check in to places, rate them, comment on them, leave tips and see who else is there. Users add venues that aren't already in the database and that's where the fun began. Without getting too graphic, we added a few places your not likely to see in the usual foursquare listings and checked in. You can check out the stream on my Facebook page if you're my friend or on my public Twitter feed (before it scrolls off into oblivion, of course). Yea, it was totally stupid and juvenile but, WTF, we were looking for something fun to do.

Not unsurprisingly, the locations we added were "closed" shortly there after. Oh well. It was stupid fun while it lasted. Anyway...

After dinner, it was off the the iBar again and then to one of the meeting rooms for the ABest Web party. It was a quick visit but we did see buy.at's Amy Ely, Stephanie Lichtenstein and a few others.

And before everyone headed over to Rain night club at the Palms for the buy.at party, the Affiliate Summit Charity Poker Tournament kicked off. And continued. And continued. And continued. Until about 2AM in the morning. But it's all good becasue it was a charity event and money was raised.

The buy.at party began at 10PM, an hour before the club opened to the public. We had the entire top floor of the club to ourselves which overlooked the dance floor. From this vantage point, there was a great view of the sea of flesh below as well as the performers who hung from scaffolding above and entertained us with all kinds of circus acrobatics.

DJ Paul Okenfold manned the turntables right after midnight and that's when things got busy. The platform dancers came out. Silver painted guys on stilts dressed like some apocalyptic tribe of warriors roamed through the crowd. Trapeze performers did their thing. And, well, we'll leave the rest to those who actually experienced it.

Around 2AM, the buy.at part of the party slowed a bit and Brandy from Planet Hollywood (@phvegas) whisked a few of us off the the Hard Rock Casino to check out a new club, Vanity. Sadly, we all didn't have the right color wrist band nor the clout to get in. OK, I was the only one who didn't get in but that was OK. A late dinner with a few friends at the American Bar and Grille in the Rio was all that was needed before sleep.

As always, there's pictures.