It’s been frustrating, at least for me, to spend so many months speaking guardedly and in the future tense: “We’re going to do this,” “We’re planning to support that,” etc. As of earlier this month, however, it’s present-tense time for Joyent. We haven’t yet started our promotional blitz, but we have already shipped for real, in the Russell Beattie sense: you pay us with a credit card and we’ll give you a hosted account for your entire team.

So now we want to tell everyone everything about it, and we started at Thursday night’s SF Tech Session. In addition to being our first public event after shipping our hosted Joyent Connector accounts, it was also our first public event after our merger with TextDrive at the end of November.

Jason Hoffman, CTO of our combined company, presented our strategy. We’re different than most so-called “web 2.0″ companies in that we’re not merely building a web-based application, but rather, we’re building an entire system of consistent web-based apps, of which email, contacts, calendaring, and file sharing are just the foundation.

What really made Jason’s presentation sing was when he shifted from “here’s the basic idea” to “here’s how I actually use it”. The latter part of his demo was a tour through his actual Joyent account. In the industry parlance, we’re eating our own dog food, and have been for months. E.g., the point of a tagging feature isn’t to check off an item on the “How to Be Web 2.0″ list; the point of tagging is to help real people organize their information and communicate with others.

Our thanks to Niall for the opportunity, and to everyone who attended for their kind words and insightful questions afterward.