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.

That mobile version we talked about a few weeks ago—it’s live.

We originally released it as a beta feature because we wanted to get some feedback on how people used it at the conference. People mostly used it as expected, to get quick information about the conference schedule or people they were trying to meet.

Because the calendar was such an integral part of the mobile experience we’re only releasing the mobile version for people with that feature (the conference plus, premium, and max packages).

The biggest change we made after getting feedback was to add an option to switch back to our normal web version. When reception or wifi is strong, there’s a group of users with great mobile phones (like the iphone) who would prefer the normal web experience. However, when reception goes south or when an attendee has an older mobile phone, the new mobile version is a life saver.

You don’t have to do anything special to access the mobile version. Just go to your regular CrowdVine URL and we’ll recognize whether you’re coming from a mobile device or not.

One of the things I really dig about CrowdVine is that, for some conferences, a CrowdVine network is the only site you end up needing.

You’ve got a way to keep in touch with your attendees.

You’ve got your social network, which of course is a must.

You’ve got your schedule listing, which for us does double duty as a personal schedule builder. Even for a network of one, our calender is a damn useful tool.

In some cases, this is all you need.

However, there’s bits of information you want your attendees to have- hotel and transport information, etc. Where’s this going to go? In the past, we’ve recommended that conference staff put this information in a blog post on the network. This doesn’t always work, though- they can get lost in the shuffle on busy sites.

So, I recently coded up the tiniest of tiny features, which allows you to create pages that live on your network, and, if you want, to place them in the top level tab navigation.

Communitech’s Entrepreneur Week is using it to great effect. Their CrowdVine network is their conference site.

If you’re a site admin, you’ll see a link to the page edit/creation UI in your admin area. You can also just create tabs that are links to elsewhere. Textile is supported, so you don’t even have to bother with HTML.