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.

TechCrunch has a nice writeup of our new conference product.

Network members can indicate not only their friends but the people they “want to meet” at the conference. Conference organizers can integrate Twitter streams and 3rd-party wikis. And everyone can export the contact information of attendees as vCards after the conference ends (a feature I so wish Facebook and other social networks would adopt).

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco and Future of Web Apps / Miami are both repeat customers. They liked the CrowdVine experience so much the first time that they signed up again.

So I started to think about where our business is coming from. It’s almost entirely based on conference organizers going to a conference that used us or attendees using us at one conference and then recommending us to the organizers of another. That makes sense since we hadn’t been advertising or marketing the product (and didn’t even officially launch it until yesterday).

• Web 2.0 Expo came to us because the conference chair used CrowdVine at FooCamp.
• Future of Web Apps contacted us because of this Scott Berkun recommendation after using us at FooCamp
• BIF3 used us based on a recommendation from Brian Jepson who’d been part of the Maker Faire network
• IA Summit is using us next April because their conference chair used us at MX East
• Lane Becker is using us at Satisfaction’s Customer Service is the New Marketing Summit based on his experience as an attendee at Future of Web Apps London. (I think we’ll be using Satisfaction for our customer service, btw)

The thing that makes me so happy is that we’ve got a lot of improvements in line for the product. So if these organizers liked the product enough now, they’re really going to be thrilled when their conference rolls around next year.

We’re launching a new service today, CrowdVine for Conferences, a way for conference organizers to give their attendees an online space for meeting, networking, and coordinating.

Back in February we had a surprise hit when we ran a demo version of our social network software for the SoCon conference in Atlanta. We’d gone to Atlanta not knowing anyone at the conference and came back feeling like we knew everyone. To this day I still talk to the friends I met there.

Most conferences give out some sort of attendee directory, usually as a printed pamphlet. Many attendees diligently browse the attendee list hoping to spot someone interesting based on their company or job title. The limitations are obvious, company and job title doesn’t offer enough information to decide if you should connect, and if you do decide to you want to meet you don’t have good options for getting in touch.

We found that the fundamental features of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn work fantastically when applied as a replacement for traditional attendee lists. The core social network features are profile pages, creating a network of contacts, and contacting other people in the network.

• Profiles let you put faces to names and find out information that is specific to the reasons you’re at the conference.
• In traditional networks you spend a lot of time marking people you already know as friends. We’re more interested in helping attendees meet new people, so we’ve made it easy to say you’re a fan-of or want-to-meet someone you’d like to know. If the other person is interested you usually end up meeting
• Attendees contact each other by leaving comments on each other’s profiles. Common comments include setting up meetings, appreciating their work, and asking questions about topics related to the conference.

We also found that our focus on simplicity made it easy for lots of attendees to use the site. We call one of our metrics “addicts,” and we define it as how many people looked at more than 100 pages. At our last conference we had 117 addicts and three attendees looked at more than 800 pages. One of our long term goals is to work with conference organizers to track how many of these addicts return to the next conference.

We have two versions of our conference service: self-service and professional-service.

The self-service option is for do-it-yourself conference organizers. We think of these as the people running BarCamps, PodCamps, and other unconferences. It’s a simple version of our social network software tweaked for conferences and a place to integrate Twitter and your wiki. BarCampBlock, run by Tara Hunt, is a nice example of this.

The professional service is for traditional conference organizers who want something they know is going to work. It takes more than software to build a massive community in just a few weeks. We customize the CrowdVine with the conference design and branding, we provide a dedicated community manager to help facilitate networking, and work with the organizer after to pull out attendee data that will help them put on a better conference the next year.

If you’re a conference organizer or conference chair, check it out. If you’re a conference attendee, send this link to the conference committee: http://www.crowdvine.com/conferences/

I did the original CrowdVine design myself. It was ugly but functional. Unless you were using IE, then it was both ugly and dysfunctional.

Then I met the fine folks at Neatworks and we decided to revamp the design. I was literally bouncing around the house after they delivered the first mockups. For the first time CrowdVine looked like a real company. Other people thought so too because I started getting phone calls that began, “May I speak to your marketing department?” Speaking.

This is how the CrowdVine home page looks in the Neatworks design.

That design is soon to be our old design. We’re revamping the home page (but not yet the networks) in order to fit in a new product (for conferences). I did the new design myself. Hopefully it’s good enough that people still treat us like a real company (because now we actually are).

FOAF is an RDF spec for describing people and the relationships between them. I thought FOAF had mostly died and been replaced by hcard/XFN. However, it looks like FOAF is going to make a come back as one of the technologies that people build their OpenSocial APIs on top of. So I decided to add it to CrowdVine. You’d think this would be simple but I couldn’t find anyone who described it clearly.

Define a MimeType in config/initializers/mime_types.rb so that we can use respond_to to implement FOAF as a second view on on existing profile page. This file is new in Rails 2.0, otherwise it would have gone in environment.rb. I’ve seen FOAF returned as either “application/rdf+xml” or “text/xml.” I don’t know the repercussions of choosing one over the other.

Mime::Type.register("application/rdf+xml", :rdf)

If your profile urls are something like /profiles/42 then we want the FOAF url to be /profile/42.rdf. I was already using map.resources :profiles which set up that route for me. However, it didn’t create a named route that would take the format (rdf), so let’s do that:

map.foaf 'profiles/show/:id.:format', :controller => "profiles", :action => "show"

Now let’s go into our controller and use respond_to to tell our action to choose a template based on the requested format.

respond_to do |format|
  format.html
  format.rdf
end

Now you’re ready for a FOAF template. If your profile template is named show.html.erb (or show.rhtml) then you want to create a new template called show.rdf.builder. The file name lets Rails know that it’s the template that should be used for RDF requests and that the template should be parsed with the builder template engine (good for XML templates). Below is the template I used. You’ll need to make modifications based on the meta data you have for your users.

xml.instruct!
xml.rdf(:RDF,
        "xmlns:rdf"  => "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#",
        "xmlns:foaf" => "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/",
        "xmlns:rdfs" =>"http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#") do

  xml.foaf(:Person) do
    xml.foaf(:name, @person.name)
    xml.foaf(:mbox_sha1sum, Digest::SHA1.hexdigest("mailto:" + @person.email))
    xml.foaf(:homepage, "rdf:resource" => profile_url(@person))
    xml.foaf(:depiction, "rdf:resource" => "http://" +
           request.host_with_port + url_for_file_column("person", "image"))   

  @person.friends.each do |friend|
      xml.foaf(:knows) do
        xml.foaf(:Person) do
          xml.foaf(:name, friend.name)
          xml.rdfs(:seeAlso, "rdf:resource" => foaf_url(friend, :rdf))
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

At this point you should be able to go to a URL like /profile/1.rdf and get back a FOAF file. If you don’t get anything back, then that means I explained something wrong. Once you are getting something back you should run the output through a FOAF validator. Unfortunately the validator everyone points to, FOAF Lint, doesn’t seem to be working. Instead, you should try the W3C RDF Validator and FOAF Explorer. FOAF Explorer lets you walk the FOAF graph. It’s really cool and I wasn’t confident I’d gotten the FOAF right until I’d seen it in Explorer.

Now that you have working FOAF, you need to make it auto-discoverable. You want to to get something in the HEAD section of your profile pages that looks like this:

<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF"
 href="http://example.com/profiles/id.rdf"/>

Since the FOAF file is only going to be auto-discoverable on profile pages you can’t just hard code that into your layout. I used the content_for helper to get around that. You define the auto-discovery link in your profile template with code like this:

<% content_for("header") do %>
<link href="<%=foaf_url(@profile, :rdf) %>" rel="meta"
type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" />
<% end %>

Then you put a line in the HEAD section of your layout to display it.

<%= yield :header %>

Here are some other links that I found helpful.
XML.com article on FOAF
FOAF Spec

Until now, I’ve been putting all CrowdVine news and announcements on my personal blog, Stubbleblog. That made sense when this was a one-person shop, but now that we’re a two person shop it’s time to have an official CrowdVine blog. We’ll use this blog for feature and customer announcements, open source releases, company news, and commentary on standards related to the company (microformats, Google’s OpenSocial, OAuth, OpenID). I’ll keep posting to my personal blog cool things I find on the nets and the occasional lengthy thought on some topic or another.

Here are some of the important CrowdVine postings from my blog:

Our Philosophy

Commodity Web Startups, Open For Beta

Customer Announcements

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, MX East 2007, BIF3: Collaborative Innovation Summit, Thingamajiggr Party, IDEA 2007, Future of Web Apps: London, BarCampBlock, Bad Online Dates, Providence Geeks, Foo Camp

Features

OpenID, vcard and OPML export

Reviews

Business Week, TechCrunch, KillerStartups, and Profy Reviews

In early August, Mark Hendrickson from TechCrunch interviewed me for an article he was writing on hosted white-label social networking services. Once he got the idea he summed up the company as “You’re a one-man Ning.”

I immediately corrected him, “I’ve got a second person starting tomorrow.” Then I went on to explain all the ways that our product and goals were different. That second person is Jay Laney and we’ve essentially run as a two-person shop ever since.

Jay looks like this:

He’s a Graduate of O’Reilly where he used to be Lead Engineer for their online group. We worked together there on a lot of things, including a social network for alpha geeks that never quite got off the ground.

He’s also a graduate of Marc Hedlund, having spent time getting Wesabe established.

He’s also responsible for a slew of CrowdVine improvements: OpenID, backups, our deploy system, this blog, friends from other CrowdVines, and a bunch more behind the scenes.