We’re at Adaptive Path’s Managing Experience Conference today. Unfortunately I missed yesterday’s keynote, Chip Heath, author of Made to Stick. Chip’s book is about ideas that stick with people. Being here made me think of some of the Adaptive Path ideas that stuck with me.

This is the third Adaptive Path conference we’ve served but my experience with the company started three jobs ago. They were helping us redesign our website. Like many companies, our website had evolved into a huge tangle of competing goals and features. Adaptive Path didn’t start with the visual design, or really any part of the design. They started with our goals. The part of that process that stuck with me was a four quadrant goal chart organized by value and difficulty. The upper right quadrant contained goals that were both very valuable and very easy to achieve. I can’t remember how you would facilitate the creation of that chart but I do think almost every day about the idea of focusing on the things that are most valuable and immediately within reach.

The second thing that I think about often is a conversation I had at Foo Camp with Janice Fraser, one of the founders. Adaptive Path was building their first web product. It had a huge amount of buzz (and went on to be acquired by Google). She explained her tactical philosophy for picking product opportunities, “We look for crowded markets where all the products suck.” A crowded market is a proven market and complaining from customers is really just their way of asking you to build them something better. I’ve used two competing conference networking products and neither introduced me to a single person at the conference. There’s probably twenty competitors in this space, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t walked into a huge opportunity.

Two more conference posts from David Spark (see also How to Web 2.0 Enable Your Event). David’s a social media strategy consultant and has been doing a lot of work with conferences.

A great example of conference follow up

How to deal with rough crowds: A stand up comic’s advice for Sarah Lacy

Demo.com did a nice overview of Social Networking Tools for Events. They do the world famous and long-lived (18 years) DEMO conference.

I liked how we differentiated ourselves in the article:

“Across the board people discount the social needs of their customers. Conferences are focused on attracting people based on the content of the conference but the people you meet are as strong a draw as the sessions.”

There’s two things we believe strongly.

1. People want to socialize at your conference. We make it as easy as possible for attendees to meet and connect with as many people as they want. Out of all the competitors in the article, our product is the only one that feels social. The rest feel robotic and mechanical and the results are too often that people don’t meet at all.

2. Our company is only as healthy as your conference. We’re always looking for ways to make your conference a consistent draw so that you get more popular every year.

News flash: CrowdVine isn’t the only site on the Internet. We’re not even the only social network. We know this. We do!

So, you’re going to a conference soonish. This conference is smart enough to have set up a CrowdVine. Maybe you’re going to Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (where you’ll see Tony and myself). Perhaps you’re heading to Miami next month for the 2008 IA Summit, or Amsterdam for ApacheCon.

You want to use us to figure out who do you want to meet when you get there. You want to arrange meetups or whatever. But, the thing is, you’re a person who can speak in complete sentences and doesn’t smell bad. At least, not so bad people run away from you. So you also already have friends that are going to be there. You don’t want to spend too much time reconnecting with them on CrowdVine.

What am I describing? The Social Graph Problem, which has been discussed quite a bit more intelligently than I’m capable of on my best day elsewhere.

So, we’ve taken some small steps already. If you’re a frequent conference goer and you’ve already defined your friends on a different CrowdVine, you’ll see a “import from other crowdvines” link under your “My Network” tab.

Now, we’ve done a Facebook importer. Just click “import from facebook” under the “My Network” tab and we’ll send you over to Facebook. The first time, you’ll be asked to re-enter your CrowdVine username and password so we can associate your Facebook account, and then you’ll see the FB friends that are also on the network you came from.

Easy, right? Also, why aren’t Tony and I friends?

Caveat: At this point, we don’t support our OpenID logins on the Facebook end. I know. It’s on the to do list.

Update: We just added OpenID support to the importer.

So, enjoy! Also, this isn’t the end of the work we want to do in this space. You name it, we want to be able to import your friends through it. Stay tuned, etc.

This is a great guide for panel moderators by Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Analyst, professional conference goer, and panel moderator).

This guide has everything, even covering how to use your body language to keep panelists talking to the audience. Plus he’s got links to everyone else that ever wrote anything good about panel moderation. If I was running a conference I’d pass this link to all my moderators.

I keep running across stories about how Web2.0 is effecting conferences.

Sometimes people are talking about how technology can help you run a better conference. David Spark’s How to Web2.0 Enable Your Live Event was the first summary that I saw. It’s still the best. But I also just ran across this academic paper, Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit. It’s a longer read but full of good info. This is the area CrowdVine is in–we want to use our software to make your conference better.

Then there’s articles about the social changes. These tools can become echo chambers for strong opinions. Here’s the worst of it, witch-hunt for Sarah Lacy. She did a mediocre interview with an extremely hard to interview CEO. In the old days people would have gotten bored and tuned out. Instead they started posting complaints to twitter, which caused a competition for who could make the most acerbic comment.

Web2.0 has also boosted the popularity of user generated content in places that aren’t using any computer technology, most notably unconferences. Unconferences are going so main stream that they now run along side normal conference tracks. MPI, an organization for meeting professionals, ran an unconference inside of their recent MeetDifferent conference. Web2.0 Expo has run unconferences at each of their last two expos and again at their Expo in April (I’m co-organizing that unconference).

Even with the occasional blow-up, this trend is good. Main stream conference content is competing with the web. Why are attendees going to come sit in a session at your conference when they can get the same information for free on the web? You have to adapt. You have to go Conference 2.0. Unconference sections let attendees get up-to-date and often extremely niche info that isn’t available anywhere else. And the social tools help people meet face-to-face. There’s no substitute for dealing with people in-person. That’s the real reason conferences are so valuable.

Interaction08 had 450 attendees and 363 users of CrowdVine. That’s 76%. I wonder if attendance at lunch was that high.

Attendees also had some nice comments on this post-conference thread. My favorite was this one:

I think that Crowdvine whether they intended for this to happen or not generates a new type of community post-conference, and that is the one where we interact without the need for an interface (or middle man - crowdvine being one).

I originally envisioned the business as a purely ad-supported operation. In that world, we’d be in bad shape if users were graduating from our software to real world relationships. However, since our clients are conferences we’re only concerned with whether we brought value to the conference. In this case, the poster met so many people in the IxD community that he no longer needs our support to keep in touch with them.

For people who have this kind of experience, the conference is the one place where they can see all their new friends in person. They’ll come back no matter what the content is. For associations, a connected membership means better knowledge transfer, better opportunities for jobs and business deals, and higher retention. Hopefully, we’ll be back for Interaction09 helping some new attendees get this same experience.

Jack Moffett wrote a really nice review of CrowdVine based on his experience using it for the IxDA Conference

Interaction 08 is only a week away, and I’m getting pretty excited about it. This is due in part to CrowdVine, a web service that allows groups to set up their own social networking site. Now, I’ve never had any particular interest in the likes of Facebook and MySpace. I do have a LinkedIn account, and while I don’t actively pursue it, I can certainly see its merits. I am really impressed with CrowdVine.

There’s more, including a nice clear description of our services. It’s wonderful to get this kind of feedback. Thanks Jack!

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.

We were covered in the New York Times today as part of a story about how small businesses use blogs to connect with their customers. One reason to check out the story is for the picture of my dog, Eggs. He’s in the lead photo with me.

The other reason is to find out the answer to the question: Should small businesses blog?

Our answer is absolutely! Small businesses thrive on community. We write for our customers because so much of our business comes from word of mouth. We write our experiences for other small businesses as a thank you for all the advice we’ve received from people who came before us. We write about software tips and our own open source contributions because our software wouldn’t be possible without the open source contributions of others.

The article covers some other great reasons for small businesses to blog. sweetriot blogs to make connections with their partners (what a larger business would call customers and vendors). You should buy some of their yummy chocolates. David Harlow, a health care consultant, blogs to market his services. The blog has ended being a source for many trade articles and that helps spread his name. Denali Flavors started a Free Money Finance blog where their MooseTracks ice cream could be the sole advertiser.

Update: I’ve written more about my experiences while running a small business at my personal blog, Stubbleblog.

We just added Twitter to our conference offering as a way for conference organizers to communicate with attendees and for attendees to connect with each other. Attendees can now add their twitterings to their profile, add someone as a twitter friend, and get messages from conference organizers. For those who don’t know, Twitter is a simple way for people to share short messages and it works extremely well on mobile phones. Of our recent conferences, about 25% of attendees already had a Twitter account.

Here’s a couple of reasons to use Twitter at your conference:

Stronger relationships. Attendees who have Twitter accounts can include their Twitterings right on their CrowdVine profile. That’s a nice way to see what each attendee is up to, but we think the key feature is the link to add the person as a friend on Twitter. For conferences, we’re totally focused on helping people making strong connections. We think it’s a big deal when we can help two people meet, but the meeting becomes much more powerful when it converts in to a permanent relationship.

News blasts. Set up a Twitter account for your conference and then use it to send out news. Good things to send are speaker announcements, travel info, and session changes. It’s a good method for sending out info because it gives attendees several options for receiving: web, text message (great while the conference is going on), RSS, and instant messenger.

Live Backchannel. Attendees can see what other people at the conference are twittering. Some of the most common and helpful chatter is about which sessions are good, which are bad, and where people are gathering after hours.

I nominated us for Best Boot Strapped company for The Crunchies (an award ceremony run by TechCrunch). I’m not sure we are a bootstrapped company, but I’d still appreciate it if you nominated us as well:

Are we a bootstrapped company? The TechCrunch criteria is that we took less than $100k in investment. That’s true–we didn’t take any investment. The first half of this year was funded by me doing consulting work. I wrote a book, did some corporate training, wrote some articles for Salesforce, and recorded a screencast. It definitely felt like bootstrapping.

However, since August we’ve been entirely funded by our customers. Some companies think of this as a bootstrapping technique. I think of it as a business model. I don’t think we’re a bootstrapped company anymore–I think we’re a small business. (But please, don’t let that stop you from voting for us above)

It’s not just semantics to me, and it probably shouldn’t be to our customers. I meet a lot of people who call themselves founders and call their companies startups. Founder puts all the value on having the idea rather than on executing or finishing. Startup tells you how long they plan to be around, at the start but not down the road when you need them. I’d rather call myself owner and my company a business.

Here’s a great article by David Spark:

How to “Web 2.0-Enable” your Live Event

The gist is that there’s a whole new world of online tools “to improve physical logistics, distribute information, connect people, and enhance face-to-face conversations.”

It’s a good primer, and even if you’ve heard of most of them you probably haven’t seen them all in one place.

A while back, Tony wrote up a post on what we were doing to protect ourselves from XSS attacks. Today, I’m releasing that same basic chunk of code as a Rails plugin.

The gist of it is, we basically run everything in the params hash through Rick Olson’s excellent white_list plugin.

That’s it. Overkill? Possibly. However, it’s been working fantastic for us. And now, it can work for you.

Because XSS attacks are horrible, horrible thing and you never want to have to deal with it. Just ask Tony.

Get it here.

Special thanks to Jodi Showers for the initial plugin work.

Hyve up interviewed me last week about our new conference product, the future of niche social networks, and where the open social network standards are going.

Four things came out of it. The blog post:

Crowdvine is dedicated to let you create your own social network in the most simple manner. Crowdvine is not for searching your long time no see high school buddies. It has been designed to enhance very specific socialization context.

Then there’s a video about our product and new release:

Here’s another video about social software going mainstream. I think there’s some good ideas in this one. The notion of an information super highway is outdated and being replaced by a “social superhighway.” And there’s a movement toward componetization on the web and the result is that communities will grow up around best of bread software components.

Another video about open social networks.