We’re being showcased next Monday at MPI’s MeetDifferent conference in Houston. MPI is Meeting Planners International, a huge association of conference and event suppliers and organizers. CrowdVine will be running a hands-on networking experience as part of their Technology Playground for emerging technologies.

I’m not sure what to expect exactly other than something akin to Woodstock for Conference Organizers. What happens when a meeting planning organization plans a meeting? I’m pretty sure we’re going to be exposed to a mix of best practices and new ideas. Jay and I are both going to be there for three days in order to soak it all in.

Exactly what the title says, this is a fantastic plain English description of social networking. If you’re trying to describe social networks to someone who doesn’t get it, you should send this.

Our friends at Interaction08 sold out a month early (perhaps because they used CrowdVine?). I think most conferences would count their blessings and move on. However, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) that runs the conference sees their mission as a lot more than just collecting registration dollars. They exist to strengthen the entire association and they see potential to bring parts of the conference to the members that couldn’t attend. They explain officially here, but the summary is:

• They will post recordings of all the sessions.
• They have a waiting list to make sure that no slot goes unfilled.
• They invite members to connect and collaborate on their CrowdVine network.

A connected membership leads to a stronger association. We’re working with three associations this month and we’d love to work with a lot more. IxDA and the others have a great enthusiasm for helping their members. Normally we say we’re not happy unless we can show a direct effect on your conference bottom line, and although we get there by helping attendees, sometimes it’s fun to do good just for the sake of doing good.

Conference organizers, if you’re interested in getting some coverage in the blogosphere then you should distribute this Tips of Conference Bloggers. Of course, step one is to know who your conference bloggers are. If you’re using CrowdVine, we’ll help you with that.

I pushed a couple of notable updates last week in between prepping for launching some upcoming conferences, so I’m going to talk about the decision behind them a little.

Private Messaging

One of the things that has always bugged me about CrowdVine’s UI was the messaging component. Here’s an example of how it used to look:

You can see what we were originally going for here- you have the ability to email some or all of your mutual contacts here. But, that’s not what people have come to expect from a social networking application. The normal use case is messaging just one person:

And that’s exactly what we have here. When you go to a mutual contact’s profile, you’ll see a private message icon.

The things I wanted to avoid doing here were twofold: a) avoid creating yet another inbox for people to have to check and b) doing much work. So, when you send someone a message, they’ll receive an email with the body of it, but your email address will not be revealed. They can respond using a url in the message. If either of you ever want to reveal your email address, you can do it yourselves.

Friend Deletion

This has been a long time coming to CrowdVine’s code, but, when you go to your contact list page, you’ll see a tiny trash can underneath your friends’ photos. If you don’t love them anymore (or if you want to do something more useful like take someone off your “want to meet” list at a conference), just click that and confirm to delete them.

Oh, we’re also on Rails 2.0.2 now, after a very painless upgrade from a recent Edge Rails revision.

I’m speaking next Tuesday (Jan 8) at the Sonoma County Web Developers about how to use social networks to achieve adult/professional goals.

Social Networks for Adults
Date: Jan 8, 2008
Location: Volunteer Center of Sonoma County
Time: Networking 6:30 PM to 7:00 PM
Program 7 to ~9pm (break, raffle ~8)

It’s inspired by a snippit from danah boyd’s ETech keynote about life stages and how they are reflected in social network behavior. A lot of early social network adopters were young. So a lot of the behavior looked immature or like it was without-value to people who were in a “more mature” stage of their life.

Here’s the trick to unlocking the value of social network: imitate people who have the same values as you. According to danah, once people have passed through life stages focused on identity creation (finding yourself) and integration/coupling (finding a career/spouse) they start to focus on societal contribution. For almost everyone, the main societal contribution is work.

There are a lot of ways social networks can help your career, company, professional association. I’d tell you now, but I’d rather see you in Santa Rosa.

As a side note, Sonoma County Web Developers is my favorite group to talk to. They are pragmatic practitioners and give great reality checks for people who spend too much time in Silicon Valley. I spoke about web2.0 two years ago and got a great piece of feedback:

Tony, our customers are small businesses, and by definition small business owners are control freaks. This empowering users thing is great, but can you give us a different benefit to sell.