We recently released a new set of themes and design options for CrowdVine. In keeping with our “function first” aesthetic, we wanted a simple interface that that allowed site administrators without HTML knowledge to create a site they liked. We also wanted to offer a new set of color themes. You’ll find them on your network under Admin → Design.

My new favorite is “Jell-O Serenade”:

But most themes are more subtle. I also like “Slate Green”:

With CrowdVine, you can start from one of these built-in themes, or use our new color picker to completely customize colors:

It can be a challenge to pick colors that work well together. We enjoyed browsing the ColourLovers “Color + Design Community for Creative Inspiration” section to help us out with that. On ColourLovers, you can browse colors, palettes, and patterns that are submitted by members of the site, or create your own. And you’ll find some of our inspiration for themes like Jell-O Serenade here.

Enjoy the new design options while buildling your social network on CrowdVine, and enjoy the network of designers on ColourLovers, too!

CrowdVine started with only one mission, make it easier for people to meet. But the more we’ve been involved with conferences the more great uses we’ve found. We’ve heard from many attendees that a social network makes a dramatic difference and that they couldn’t imagine going to a conference without one. Here’s why:

#1 Networking That Works
No matter how appealing the next four reasons are, this is still the killer feature. A major slice of your attendees need to get value out of networking in order to justify the trip. A conference needs three things to give that networking value: great attendees, time to network, and a way to connect the right people. Most conferences only provide the first two, so attendees need to be both brave in approaching strangers and lucky in that they approach the right strangers. A social network solves this fantastically well. Attendees can mingle online before the conference starts and then show up recognizing faces and having setup meetings.

#2 The Right Content to the Right People
We added an integrated conference schedule and agenda builder to our social networks in 2007 and it’s become a standard feature for everyone in this space. Agenda builders have been available for years, but there are two things you get by having them integrated with the rest of your conference community. One, you can see where the buzz is, which sessions are popular and with whom. Two, you can discuss the content of those sessions beforehand.

Knowing what’s buzz-worthy helps attendees make better decisions about which sessions to attend. Getting a discussion going beforehand gives attendees familiarity with the subject. It also gives speakers familiarity with the attendees and a chance to adjust their material accordingly.

#3 Buzz
If you give attendees a great experience they will talk about it after the event. But you really want them talking about your event before the event. To do that you have to give them something valuable early. That leads to higher turnout. People may even join your network before they register.

There’s a big difference between a potential attendee seeing your conference advertisement in a trade journal and thinking “I’d like to attend” versus joining a community, marking which sessions they want to attend, and being greeted by other attendees. That difference is a real commitment to attend. There’s even science to back this up. A person’s follow through increases 70% if they are part of a community with a similar goal. Not everyone in the network has to be a registered attendee at first. Giving people on the fence a chance to participate will bring them through the doors.

#4 Communication
I’m constantly amazed by the number of small problems that get resolved by having a place to gather. People will coordinate ride shares. They will create ad-hoc gatherings. They will share trade-knowledge. They will give restaurant and travel tips. These are simple things that just needed some communication lubricant in order to work out. With a social network, attendees can make their experience better without any work from you. (This does not make meeting planners less valuable by the way, it frees them to work on other parts of the event.)

#5 Save Paper
Most events create a lot of print materials in order to share the conference program, updates to the conference program, and a list of conference attendees. You can stop this. Conference social networks provide a vastly better version of the attendee directory. They also have the conference agenda which you can keep up to date. When you delete or move a talk, that change will show up in an attendee’s personal schedule. CrowdVine even has a mobile optimized version that works on any mobile phone. At the very least you should be promoting these alternatives to paper and gradually reducing your print runs.

If your past experience with social networks seemed like a waste of time, then you’ve been hanging out on the wrong networks. A conference social network may be a trendy technology, but it’s solving fundamental problems with your event. Attendees get this and we routinely see more than 50% of the attendees using our networks. Now what are your reasons for wanting or using an event social network?

When I started CrowdVine, I broke several standard start-up practices. I didn’t talk to venture capitalists, I didn’t have a co-founder, and I didn’t even seek out an advisory board. Instead, I spent two months building a prototype and then took that to real customers.

For the most part, our customers have been our advisory board. But I’ve also been lucky to have a great adviser at home. My significant other, Sarah Milstein, is our only official adviser or investor and she’s brimming with relevant advice. She’s the founder of the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference and chair of the last two Web2Open unconferences in San Francisco, a second year UC Berkeley MBA student, and founder of her own startup, 20slides.com.

Most importantly she’s been producing an incredible body of work for how to use Twitter effectively. She’s been on Twitter since the first day of private beta and has interviewed hundreds of companies about their usage. This is work you should know about if you are trying to figure out how to use Twitter for your business or event.

First, there’s The Twitter Book, available in electronic editions now and in print next month. Here’s a preview, Chapter 3: Hold Great Conversations

Second, there’s the Twitter for Business webcast.

Third, if you want to keep abreast of the latest Twitter news, follow Sarah’s @TweetReport Twitter account.

If that’s not enough, I can personally recommend approaching her to speak at your conference or paying for the Advanced Twitter for Business webcast or the Micromessaging Revolution research report, all available from her personal site, SarahMilstein.com. Also if you like webcasts, you should sign up for the 20slides.com announcement.

Oprah and Shaq love Twitter, but how much do conference attendees use it?

We’ve been including attendee Twitter accounts in our conference social networks since 2007, so we have great historical data on how it’s growing within existing communities and into new ones.

If you haven’t seen it yet, HubSpot has published their State of the Twittersphere, covering general Twitter usage. Consider this post the Conference edition.

Here’s the quick summary.

• Usage is growing in every industry (70% per year)
• It’s present in every industry (at least 5% of attendees)
• Attendees tend to be very influential Twitter users (1100 avg followers vs. 70 for a typical Twitter user)

Attendee Characteristics

• We saw a major split in how many people attendees follow. Attendees at business and marketing conferences followed an average of 800 people, while attendees at design and higher education conferences followed an average 225. What does this mean for conference organizers? If attendees in your industry are selective about who they follow then you need to make sure your conference Twitter account keeps a high signal to noise ratio.
• The average attendee has 1100 followers. This is much higher than general Twitter users, which according to HubSpot have an average of 70 followers.
• In the Hubspot survey of users, 12% of users had more than 100 followers. In our data, 68% of attendees had more than 100 followers. Here’s Hubspot’s general follower data vs. our attendee follower data:
  
• The trend toward high follower counts held across all industries, although some industries were much higher than others:
  

Adoption

• Overall, 8.7% of CrowdVine conference attendees included a Twitter account. We have anecdotal evidence that that percentage tracks closely with actual number of active public attendee Twitter accounts. Obviously, it doesn’t count attendees who have private accounts or non-attendees who followed the conference through the conference Twitter account.
• Across industries, we saw at least 5% of conference attendees with Twitter accounts, this includes mainstream industries like higher education and health care:
  

  Tech: 16%
  Business 9%
  Youth 8%
  Health 6.5%
  Higher Education 5%

• Our highest adoption rates did come from Tech conferences, but those weren’t limited to Silicon Valley folk. Three of our four conferences with the highest adoption rates came from regional events in the Southern US or in the UK.
• In the last six months we’ve only seen two conferences with low Twitter usage (1% or lower). One was an internal corporate event which had Twitter users but for cultural reasons they wanted to keep their identities separate. The second group were mostly old-school CEOs. Both conferences were otherwise very active on CrowdVine, so they weren’t technology luddites.
• The highest adoption we’ve seen in a conference was 43% of attendees with a Twitter account. That could easily be a measure of how compelling / easy it is to add your Twitter account to CrowdVine. So if you think that conference, Social Graph Foo Camp held in early 2008, actually had 80% Twitter adoption then you could double all of our other adoption numbers. We have some ways we can look at this issue the next time we do this report.

Growth

• In conferences where we have multiple year data, we’ve seen adoption jump by 70%. This data includes events outside of Web 2.0 early adopters.
• The range of growth within conference series was between 50 and 100%. However, during that same period, Twitter reported that they grew 1400%. We think that indicates much of Twitter’s growth is coming from new communities.

If you have any Twitter data you’d like to share, post it in the comments.

Does anyone use OpenID anymore?

OpenID is a standard that lets people use one account to login to lots of sites. For example, when they join CrowdVine they can use their OpenID instead of creating yet another password. We added OpenID support to CrowdVine when we launched and then began supporting the second version of the standard last December. It’s part of our philosophy for CrowdVine to augment existing social networks, not replace them. So we need to play well with the rest of your web identities. My personal experience is that OpenID is a big convenience that’s resulted in me spending much less time clicking on “forgot password” links. I would recommend it to any user (see openid.net for getting started).

Despite the benefits and increasing support from major sites, I’ve also heard from friends that they’ve seen OpenID usage drop on their own sites. Our stats are bleak. Usage dropped in our tech conferences and isn’t used at all (as in ever) in our mainstream conferences.

Across all of our networks usage hovers between 1-2%, down from 3-5% in the first half of 2008:

It’s hard to generalize that data because the demographics of CrowdVine users shifted toward the mainstream during that same period. So I broke it down for some conferences where we’ve done multiple events over the course of about 12-18 months.

We did a series of four events for a conference in the tech/marketing sector. This audience tends toward the cutting edge. Here was the adoption over four events:

Tech/Marketing #1: 8%
Tech/Marketing #2: 3%
Tech/Marketing #3: 1%
Tech/Marketing #4: 3%

We did another series of events for the open source conferences. These were software developers who share a philosophy with the people behind OpenID. They’re the only group I could find where the adoption picked up (although the sample size is small):

Open Source #1: 5%
Open Source #2: 2%
Open Source #3: 9%

The above two conference series were the ones I expected to have early adopters. I also looked at a series of events for online marketers. I thought they’d be in the second wave of adopters but they turned out to have almost no OpenID users.

Online Marketing #1: 0.5%
Online Marketing #2: 0.5%
Online Marketing #3: 0%
Online Marketing #4: 0%

Adoption for our doctor, lawyer, scientist and business communities are all under 0.5% and in almost all cases adoption is zero.

So what’s going on? Jay and I were just at a conference session yesterday where we got a long lecture on how opinions are worthless and data is everything. The data here doesn’t look good even though my anecdotal evidence is that OpenID is extremely useful. As I read the data, OpenID is was not very sticky with the early adopters and didn’t make any progress at all with our mainstream networks.

The CrowdVine design aesthetic is to be functional first, but if you have a fabulous web design, we want to be able to work with that. White labeling is too boring a term for what’s possible on CrowdVine. Here are some examples:

IA Summit 09 - design by Kent State University

WebTrends Engage 2009 - design by WebTrends Inc

FOWA Miami - design by Elliot Jay Stocks

Twiistup - design by Elliot Jay Stocks

Launch Party - design by Ross

BioCrowd - design by NeatWorks Inc

Do you need a design for your site? Some of the designers we listed above have full time jobs. But two of them are definitely worth checking out. We recommend NeatWorks to our customers. They do good work in a range of styles and are very professional to work with. We’ve also had two conference customers who worked with Elliot Jay Stocks and we’re big fans of his designs.

We just updated our reviews page and I asked people around the company which were their favorite reviews. (Now we’re reviewing the reviewers!)

Christian says, “I like how our simplicity can be so powerful.”

Brian Jepson [Providence Geeks]: CrowdVine is totally crowd-centric: you answer a few questions, post a photo, maybe friend a few people in the group, and that’s it. From there, CrowdVine turns into a back-channel for an event or association, and is great for matching names to faces, finding out more about someone, or informal followups before, after.

Tony (that’s me) says, “This was our second conference and after this quote I knew we were on to something.”

Gareth Branwyn [MakerFaire]: Within a few hours, over 100 people had signed on, started linking and commenting, piping in their blog feeds, Flickr pools, social bookmarks. It really was kind of extraordinary.

Jay says, “I want CrowdVine to be a company where we can measure the value we create.”

Jeff Haynie [SoCon]: I think the tipping point was CrowdVine. I tracked the numbers during registration and like most events, there is an inflection point. In our case, that tipping point was when the CrowdVine social network came online.

Chris says, “I like that we have a clear value that’s easy to understand”

Sarah Worsham [Web 2.0 Expo]: CrowdVine’s networks are centered on allowing network members to connect and communicate. Everything on the network exists to facilitate this communication - profiles, comments, blog posts, and profile questions, all of which are featured on the homepage.

Sarah says, “This reflects my experiences. As an attendee, CrowdVine gets me more excited about conferences and gets me talking about them more. As an organizer, it helps me plan better
events.”

Grace Porter [JISC]: It is definitely adding to the buzz around the conference and it
certainly helps us…tap into what delegates are discussing in the run
up to the Conference…and who they are interested in hooking up with.

Terrie says, “I loved this review because it neatly describes our benefit….’Help me meet someone.’ CrowdVine’s power is that it helps you meet people you don’t already know, within the context of a conference. You could try friending and following other attendees using more general social networking software, but you lose the conference context…a few months later, you’re looking at your “friends” list and wondering who some of these people are! CrowdVine for conferences helps you create real living relationships instead of awkward accumulations of stranger-friends.

Chris Spiek [Search Marketing Expo]: I had never heard of CrowdVine, but it was free, so I had nothing to lose. Creating an account took less than ten minutes. I entered my interests, professional information, links to profiles (LinkedIn, etc), and uploaded my photo. When I logged in I knew I was on the way to accomplishing my goal. I still didn’t know anyone, but the discussions that were happening on the site led me to believe that other conference goers were hiring the site for the same reason that I was. Discussion topics included, “Who Is Arriving Early And Attending the Sunday Cocktail Party,” and “Who Wants to Find a Good Manhattan Wine Bar on Monday Night?” I joined in on a few of the conversations, and accomplished my goal. Then CrowdVine took it a step further. I received an email a few hours later telling me that someone wanted to meet me while I was at the conference. I clicked the link, and it was another online marketing professional with similar interests. Until then I hadn’t noticed the “+ Someone I Want to Meet.” link under the photo on people’s profiles. After scanning the profiles of a number of people on the site, I began clicking the link and letting people know that I’d like to meet them. This one tiny link was no great programming feat, but it’s inclusion in the software enabled it to accomplish the job that I needed to have done. Help me meet someone.

You can now run your CrowdVine network under a custom domain, like mysocialnetwork.com, or crowdvine.mycompany.com. Look for it under Admin -> Custom Domain.

This is a free feature, although you’ll have to understand how to manage your own DNS settings.

If CrowdVine is your entire website, then you’ll need to change the A record for your account. That way all traffic, www.mynetwork.com, mynetwork.com, typo.mynetwork.com, etc., will resolve to your CrowdVine network.

If CrowdVine is an addition to your existing site, then you’ll need to create a subdomain and a CNAME record. Our conference customers are the most likely people to do this, using something like connect.myconference.com.

Exact details about which domains and IP address to point to are included as part of the setup.

We’ve opened up our session ratings feature to the public. Now you can collect simple five-star reviews for the overall content and for each speaker.

If you’re running a network with a calendar, head over to Admin -> Calendar and flip the switch. Also, make sure to set your timezone correctly in Admin -> About, because the ratings don’t turn on until the session has started. That way only people who show can rate them.

Adding ratings is simply a matter of selecting one to five stars for the overall content and again for each speaker. Sometimes the content is good but the delivery is bad, but hopefully they’re good in both cases. If the attendees want they can also leave a written review.

As a moderator, you can view the ratings from a web report that’s sortable by rating, track, number of reviews, and number of attendees. You can also download the results into Excel.

I don’t think I did enough to highlight this quote from a conference we did last fall for the Association of Learning and Technology.

“The ALT-C 2008 social network was delivered using CrowdVine and was, by all accounts, very successful. Having been involved with a few different approaches to this kind of thing, I think CrowdVine offers a range of functionality that is hard to beat. At the time of writing, over 440 of the conference’s 500+ delegates had signed up to CrowdVine! This is a very big proportion, certainly in my experience. But it’s not just about the number of sign-ups… it’s the fact that CrowdVine was actively used to manage people’s schedules, engage in debates (before, during and after the conference) and make contacts that is important.”
–Andy Powell

Seventy-three percent of delegates participated, and by participate we mean dove in with both feet. Since then we’ve been having a lot of success with conferences that were using our networks to push a learning agenda. In this economy, taking a few simple steps, like adding a social network, can make the value of your own event hard to beat.

We’ve upgraded or added file-upload features all over the site. You can post presentation files and attachments to talks, add file attachments to discussions, post a file when you leave a comment, and add files to your site in order to help customize it.

Presentation Files
When you go to add or edit a talk, you now have the option to add a single presentation file and any number of attachments. Some people put the presentation and all supporting material into a single .zip file, others are using the extra attachment options to include supporting materials for the session.

We’ve also added a page where attendees can see all of the available presentation files.

Discussion Threads
You’ve long been able to add a single image to a discussion thread. But we’ve also had many requests to be able to add multiple images, or to add different types of files, like podcasts. Now you can add several files of any kind when you start a discussion.

Site Files
In order to customize a site, people often want to be able to upload image files or background gradients. If you need to do that, we’ve added a “Manage uploads” option to your Admin page.

Free for now
We’re launching without upload limits for now. Add as many as you want. However, we will probably add a tiered package system down the road. Also, our terms of use still apply. Sites that generate DMCA take-down notices will get this feature removed and/or have their network removed.

I’ll be giving an updated version of my Social Networking for Everyone talk to the Golden Gate Computer Society this Monday, January 26th at 7:15pm in San Rafael. They have more details on their site.

This is an updated version of a talk I gave a year ago to the Sonoma County Web Developers and then again last Spring to the California Society of Association Executives. What I wanted to show people then was that anyone who cares about their friends, their family, or their business needs to invest some time with social networks.

That’s only more true now.

We’ve added a new feature that lets members connect to their address book in order to quickly search a network for people they already know or to find people to invite. You may already be familiar with our Facebook friend suggest feature. This is similar, except now we’ve extended it to CSV or vCard address book files, LinkedIn, GMail, Yahoo mail, and Hotmail.

There are two halves to this. One is friend suggest, letting you know right away who you already know in the network. In a big network, especially for an event, we want to make sure you don’t miss out on a chance to put a face to someone you’ve only emailed with or to setup meetings with old friends or colleagues.

The second half is friend invite. If you’re enjoying a network, chances are you know lots of other people who will enjoy it also. Friend invite makes the invitation process simple. We have this feature turned off by default for conferences.

We’re also very aware of other services that have abused address book imports in order to send spam. We try to make our policy very clear, so that you and your members know what to expect.

If you’re an event planner you definitely need to check out these three top web tools of 2008 lists:

• Event Manager Blog’s 75+ tools for your next event
• Steve Wheeler’s 2008 Tools and Technologies Retro
• eLearning’s Top Ten Web Tools of 2008

I feel like we’re cheating a bit by posting another new features entry this week. These are coming from a backlog of features that have been in private usage, but needed some polish before being opened up to the public.

Reports
We’ve added a slew of reports to the Admin section. All networks now have reports for most popular, loneliest, most active, activity by day, and general usage. The reports come as HTML, for easy following, and CSV, for times when you want to work with them in Excel.

We also have a few reports that are specific to conferences: session attendance and session ratings.

I want to give a little bit of back story on two of the reports, most popular and loneliest. The idea of popularity on a network is completely unscientific, but often it can tell you a little bit about the community and even suggest people you want to meet. Before CrowdVine, I built a social network for people in tech. The first time we looked at the most popular list, the founder of our company exclaimed of the most popular person, “This list is useless, I’ve never heard of this person.” The person turned out to have founded a wonderful company that was recently acquired for $22M. The correct response from our founder should have been “I must meet this person.”

The loneliest users list is an idea that I first heard of from Flickr. The point is not to identify and then mock unpopular people. It’s to find people who took the time to join your site but have not yet had meaningful social interactions. Not everyone is a social butterfly and part of the job of a great moderator is to welcome and greet new people.

Tag Auto-complete
One of our best features is our ability to turn common profile answers into tags so that people can click through and see everyone who gave that answer. However, tagging is a rough business and people often choose different words to mean the same thing. We’ve added auto-complete when you’re filling out your profile we can guide you to the most popular answers. The goal is not to turn people into clones, but to help them converge on one answer when there are multiple answers that mean the same thing.

Here’s an example from a network I’m on for former employees of O’Reilly Media. The division I worked in is referred to by many names, including O’Reilly Network and ORN, but the one most people have settled on is OPG.

Question Help Text
A lot of people have asked for help text to go along with the profile questions. You can now add help text to any question from Admin -> Profile questions -> advanced options.

I just open sourced one of our internal tools, a script to post notifications of Highrise activity into a Campfire chat room. You can download the Highrise notifier from GitHub:
http://github.com/crowdvine/highrise_to_campfire/tree/master

Highrise and Campfire are both products from 37signals and are two of our most important tools. Highrise is a simple customer relationship manager. We love it. Campfire is a simple chat room. It’s how we stay in touch when we’re not working in the same physical space.

The key part of our workflow is to keep our work status updated in the chat room. It’s a way to avoid meetings, and I like the feeling of momentum. Almost all of our work activities generate a notification.

There are a lot of other great scripts that you could use with Campfire. When I was getting the script ready for release, I pulled some bits from Backfire, a Backpack to Campfire notifier. So of course I have to recommend that. If you search GitHub, you can also find notifiers for code commits, twitter searches, Basecamp, and continuous integration servers.

I’ve got a couple of new tidbits we’ve rolled out that I wanted to talk about. They’re targeted at two of my favorite user groups: international conferences and tech geeks.

Time zones

Despite my repeated denials, the entire world does not reside in Pacific Standard Time.

In fact, in addition to the conferences we’ve been working with stateside, we’ve had an increasing number of overseas conferences (Web 2.0 Berlin and ApacheCon Europe are good examples) that needed proper time zone support.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Conference admins, if you click the “About” link in your admin section, you’ll see a drop down to change your time zone.

OpenID 2

First off, I should say, OpenID isn’t just for geeks. Sick of remembering a bunch of different passwords on a bunch of different sites?

Yeah, so am I. So, if you’re a User of Authenticated Web Applications, OpenID is probably worth reading about.

The actual news here is that we now consume OpenID 2. Enjoy!

I’ve been using Twitter for over two years to keep in touch with people personally, but lately it’s become an essential business tool.

About half of CrowdVine’s support requests originate on Twitter. When someone is blocked by a bug they email directly. When they’re merely annoyed they go somewhere to complain, and that place is often Twitter. We monitor search.twitter.com for any mention of CrowdVine and try to respond to all of them, good or bad.

Many of our conference customers use it even more heavily. It’s a place for them to broadcast information to attendees, share interesting links, and follow buzz. If you’re wondering if this is something for your business, then I’ve got two excellent resources for you.

First, here’s an introductory screencast on Twitter for business:

If you need more in depth coverage you should buy the research report from the same author, Sarah Milstein (also a CrowdVine advisor and my partner). It’s $249, which, if you’re used to getting your information online, might seem like a lot. However, if you need early access to business best practices, it’s a steal. Sarah got great access to the Twitter founders and to the businesses using Twitter.

O’Reilly Radar has an interview with Francois Gossieaux about online communities in business. He’s led some interesting research, and highlights something that’s been on my mind:

Most businesses begin planning a community with traditional objectives (lower support costs, drive innovation, increase customer loyalty etc.). On the Social Web this is the equivalent of entering a personal relationship with an ulterior motive (which never works out quite right).

So how do you turn those ulterior motives into something that works? Either re-frame the goals in terms of serving something that the community needs or revise your expectations to follow the community wherever they lead you.

We run into the goals issue all the time. A customer will ask if we can provide a permanent community and we respond with a limited yes, “We can provide software that will support a permanent community.”

One reason, of many, that we do so many conference communities is because we like giving an unqualified yes. Attendees go to your events to network. They pay thousands of dollars in registration and travel, endure socially awkward situations, and rely on chance encounters in order to make a few friends or business contacts.

Will they adopt a tool that helps them plan those meetings ahead of time, put names to faces, and connect with more of the right people? Will the conference CrowdVine network be successful? Yes. Not because social networks are trendy, but because you’re serving a need.

I like when we can show the breadth of people who enjoy CrowdVine. So it was nice to read this review from an attendee of BarCampBank (i.e. a conference for the financial sector).

Say you are in a new industry and you are attending a conference in another state. You’ve heard about some of the innovators in the field who are going to be at the conference. But you also know there are going to be hundreds of people there who you’ve never heard of before, and want to meet many of them to start developing your personal network. CrowdVine lets you see who is coming to the event ahead of time, and lets you designate that you are a fan of someone, and also that you want to meet someone. Because of the personal items that you can import into CrowdVine (your blog, twitter stream, and flickr photos), you can really get a good sense of what a person is all about via that source. This is very different from a friend on Facebook, where you can’t get any info on the person until AFTER you’ve agreed to be friends with him/her, and rightly so because it is of a personal rather than professional nature. CrowdVine is all about making connections that happen because of an event in common. And it’s pretty good at what it does; it really is an icebreaker to have heard of, and/or seen a photo of, a person who is going to an event that you are attending.