Now Nate Westheimer, who has taken on the Web2Open duties for NY, is bringing it back! If you’re in NYC on September 18th, then this is session you need to go to.

More on the Web2Open directly from Nate.

my prediction is that Ning is going to get its head handed to it on a platter.

Although I’m glad we fared so well in the head to head comparison, I find that we rarely compete with Ning for customers and that, for the most part, a customer can make the right choice between the two of us without hurting either of our feelings. I’ve got some other criteria and explanation which I think are useful for making the right choice (and important for anyone who wants to understand where social network software is going).

CrowdVine and Ning have fundamentally different company structures and that leads to different approaches which I think, now and for the future, means that we will live in different segments of the same market. Also, I have tremendous respect for the team Ning has put together, starting with their founders Marc and Gina and including the engineers I’ve met (Brian McCallister in particular), so I don’t expect that anyone is going to hand them their head on a platter and I’m very sure that if anyone tries, CrowdVine won’t be the platter, the hand, or the instrument of displacement.

Ning was founded as a traditional Silicon Valley startup. It’s backed by venture investors who are by definition driving for massive growth (and they’re succeeding). Ning has massive amounts of funding (over $100M) and is by far the most successful of the venture backed social network software providers.

CrowdVine was founded as a traditional business. Our goal is to build a company that is sustained from the beginning by our revenue and that keeps building great software every year until we become too old and too tired to raise our pickaxes. We’re 100% privately owned and we’re profitable.

That gives us an independence that no venture backed startup can have, and I think that’s essential to the promise we’re making to niche communities. We’re promising them their own form of independence: a community that’s free and separate from the mass market social networks they had to live in before. I think that promise is strengthened if we as providers don’t also have a massive financial obligation (we have only a small obligation, which we’ve met, to pay the rent).

Because of that fundamental difference in company organization I find that CrowdVine and Ning have and will continue to have fundamentally different qualities. Briefly, those qualities in CrowdVine are that we make a direct connection between your time spent on our network and you achieving a goal, that we can and do make powerful niche customizations, and that you can get very high level support.

First, on the topic of connecting your time as a user to achieving a goal. Our customers are network creators who come with existing business goals. If we solve those goals we justify our pay. We have no incentives to keep you on the site, but lots of incentives to help you achieve your goals.

As a comparison, the first time I saw Gina (Ning’s CEO speak), she described Ning’s design philosophy as “if you’re hosting a party you don’t want to run out of activities.” They’re building very feature rich software so that their networks have lots of activities and so that they are good places to hang out. A lot of older people are confused by the popularity of social networks like MySpace and Facebook, but the truth is that these types of social networks are an upgraded form of leisure. People who knock social networks as not comparable to real life socializing are missing a crucial fact: social networks don’t replace face-to-face, they replace TV. Measured by usage this is probably the biggest segment of the market and so is a great opportunity for a venture backed startup like Ning. Ning is an eyeballs business. They need you to hang around (and if hanging around is a replacement for TV, then that’s a very good thing).

CrowdVine is a goal oriented business not an eyeballs business. Our design philosophy is to connect people and then get out of their way. That comes out in the features.

All our email notifications include everything you need to make a response through email: the full text of the message or comment, and the email address of the person on the other end. No need to return to CrowdVine.

Luke identifies OpenID as one of CrowdVine’s differentiators, but that’s just part of a larger example to connect and integrate with what people are doing outside of our networks. We also pull in your Flickr, Twitter, and blog feeds directly into your profile. We’d rather be the glue for your content than the repository.

Advertising is yet another way this comes out. Luke points out both that we have minimal advertising on our free options and that we could do a lot to optimize our ad revenue. However, we’re not an ad-supported company (less than 1% of revenue), so you’re not going to see any of our networks suddenly plastered with ads.

Second, on the topic of niches. We’re not always the right choice, but when we are, we’re very right.

The market for simple focused social networks is smaller than the market for leisure social networks. Partially this is true because so many of the best customers are businesses and they tend to either adopt later than consumers or have customized needs.

But if your goal is to connect with people, the fewer features the better. I learned this first hand on the team that launched Twitter. Every pundit we heard from compared us to earlier companies that had “more compelling features.” What none of these pundits seemed to get is that the only compelling feature for Twitter was the people. Any other feature was a barrier. If you have such a use case, then CrowdVine is the social network platform for you.

Plus there’s one specific niche where we do have a customized version, conferences. Our CrowdVine for Conferences product has features you can’t find in any social networking platform and that wouldn’t make sense for any use case beside conferences.

These “niches” are great for us because we can show real value to our customers but make a lot less sense for Ning because on the one hand the market for simple is smaller and on the other hand the individual markets for verticals like conferences are simply too small for that much venture backing.

Third, support. Put simply, you can get the founder of CrowdVine on the phone. I’m not out talking to the investors, or managing a huge team of people, I’m talking to our customers every day. Again, I think that’s part of being a business that depends on the success of our network creators. Plus, as a company that’s enthusiastic about conferences as a customized niche, you get specialized feedback and experience to go along with the specialized software.

Wow! Today is Jay Laney’s one year anniversary at CrowdVine. I was rereading the blog post I wrote, Introducing Jay, and noticed that it wasn’t written until November. We had such a backlog of work that it took three months before Jay could get even set up an official blog.

It’s been an amazing year, and a lot of it is because of the work Jay’s been doing. He’s been behind the customizations for a number of our best customers. He did our Facebook integration. We’ve seen a massive improvement in performance, many of our pages moved from an F to a B+ in the YSlow grading system. He did our private messaging system, our new microformats spider for calendar integrations, our improved feed spider (much faster and reliable) and much more. Basically he does the hard work while I talk on the phone.

Some stats, since Jay started we’ve gotten 91% of our users, 83% of our networks, 94% of our revenue, and 100% of our New York Times mentions. So clearly, he panned out!

The result is that CrowdVine has been able to go through two major milestones. First we figured out an important new business model, social networks for conferences and were able to build a product that can reliably serve them. Then we were able to build a business that wasn’t just break even, it was profitable enough to expand.

The day before hiring Jay, TechCrunch had described us as a one-man Ning. His hire meant changing the company description. Well, I just saw Jay describe himself to a customer as the other half of CrowdVine.

Unfortunately (but very much thanks to him), Jay is going to need to change his description. We’re expanding. We have a team of designers on contract that let us customize our networks so that they match your existing design and branding. We’ve brought in help for a site redesign. And we have a good friend helping us with the services side of our business.

I want to give our friend a proper introduction when he’s ready, but the summary is that we’re definitely much more than a two-man Ning. We’re a three-plus-friends-amazing-social-networks business.

Thank you Jay!

However, unconferences don’t need to be done as independent conferences–they can be incorporated into a traditional conference program. MPI, an association of conference professionals, ran an unconference track as part of their recent Meet Different Conference. The Web 2.0 Expo series of conferences has been running an unconference track (Web2Open) at their last three events. I co-organized the last Web2Open and here are some tips that you can use for your own unconference track:

1. Use OpenSpace techniques.
We’d never organized an unconference before so we were worried about the logistics. How do you explain the concept? What are the ground rules? How do you facilitate the schedule creation? We read up on and cribbed techniques from OpenSpace Technology. Open Space is set of techniques and resources for running meetings such as unconferences. They’re a great resource and we did fine as first-timers because of them.

2. Discussion only–no presentations or projectors.
One of your major headaches will be turning down people who want to give sales presentations. If their presentation was any good you would have already accepted them into the main track. The strength of the unconference track is that it allows for discussion. We had plasmas available but the best sessions were discussion only. Don’t give any room for people to lecture. Take away the projectors. Say no to presentations. Everyone will be happier with the result.

3. Have a highlights board in the main conference area.
At an independent unconference everyone is there for the same thing. They’re in the same area and on the same schedule. If you’re integrating an unconference track you’re going to need to work hard to make people aware of all the great sessions that are going on. We put a big white board in the main area and put highlights from each time slot.

4. Offer free passes for volunteers.
Our volunteers spent a lot of time answering questions about what an unconference was, what sessions were going on, how someone could add a session, and where a particular session was being held. That left us free to help the speakers, work out space issues, and actually attend part of the conference that we’d spent all this time organizing. The volunteers seemed happy to trade their time for free conference passes.

5. Coordinate before-hand online.
Normally unconferences put up a wiki where attendees can announce that they’re coming and suggest session ideas. This sort of coordination becomes an order of magnitude more important when you’re incorporating the unconference into your main track. Attendees will be coming and going. But how will they know when to come? By far the most successful session at Web2Open was on Health 2.0. The session coordinator found every single attendee in health care or medicine, emailed them to let them know about the session, and asked them what topics they wanted to cover. The result was 30 attendees who went over their allotted time by 60 minutes and when they finally did end, had looks on their faces that made clear that they’d just attended the best session of their lives, one that had been specifically tailored to them.

How did the Health 2.0 guy find and contact all those attendees? Web 2.0 had a CrowdVine conference social network. Wiki’s are nice but our social networks make it much easier to discover attendees (because of our tagging feature) and then to contact them. We hear a story like this every time we’re involved in an unconference.

CrowdVine is an entirely virtual company. We’re based around the San Francisco Bay Area and our customers are based all over. This trip to NYC is one of the advantages of being virtual. Jay is staying with family. And I’ve arranged a house exchange with a law professor at the New York Law School.

The professor is a CrowdVine customer and uses us to help Patent Lawyers find jobs. That’s more proof that the main predictor of a successful network is having a reason to network (and not tech savviness).

Hope to see you in New York!

I love talking to normal people about emerging technologies and from a technology perspective these folks were very mainstream (although from a leadership perspective they were elite). To give you a sense, the other speaker was the president of the association of chain link fence manufacturers. Here’s where some of the highlights from the presentation and the feedback:

There are three primary reasons the executives were interested in social software (blogs, wikis, social networks). They want to know what the buzz is about. They want to be more relevant with young members. They want to continue to attract and retain members.

One of the first questions was how hanging out on Facebook for hours on end would help their association. Luckily I had an answer. It won’t. That’s leisure and nobody should be doing that as part of their work day. However, there are plenty of ways to use a social network for professional use cases. You just need to stay away from the leisure activities.

Another concern was that their members were older and unfamiliar with social software. All of our demographic data shows that the number one driver of activity is how strongly people want to network. At a recent tech conference, 9 of the top 10 job titles fell in the range between Project Manager and CEO. The geeks had been pushed out by managers and executives. Also, our networks for associations are always our most active because people join associations to network. Familiarity with social networks never comes into play (although people need to own a computer).

Interestingly, nobody had a strong desire to blog. I think this is because their members weren’t big blog readers. However, several people had good experiences with blog search and I was able to point them to Summize which is just as powerful but for Twitters.

Some people think associations have a problem because they aren’t attracting a younger demographic. As evidence, only two people in the room of 150 were younger than 30. The alternative view though was that people aren’t seeing the need for associations until they’re more established. I tend to believe that.

My goal was to give people a framework about thinking of social software as a tool to solve a problem. A blog can be a way to communicate and converse with members. A wiki can help you publish and update key information. A social network can help members connect. And of course, a CrowdVine social network for your conference means your attendees show up knowing who they want to talk to.

Usage records:

• By new user signups, February was a record month, twice our previous record in November. March was even higher and April was three times higher than November.
• By page views April were three times higher than in February.
• This month is our sales record. We signed up twelve new conferences. That doesn’t count all the unconferences that use our self-service version.

Conference Records:

• Web2.0 Expo set records with 2000 users and 10000 connections made.
• IA Summit set a record for page views per user at over 160. The average CrowdVine user at the conference spent 90+ minutes on the site. That’s not proof that we’re good, it’s proof that people want to network.
• One attendee at Web 2.0 set a record for most page views by someone who wasn’t spidering or screen scraping us: 2577.

Growth:

• We’ve got a nice foothold in web technology conferences (15% of Web 2.0 attendees had used us for at least one other conference) but you don’t need to be a technologist to want to meet people. So I’m excited this month to be branching out into marketing, youth, and education conferences.
• We’ve always relied on word-of-mouth. We don’t have a salesperson. Of the twelve new conferences this month, three were previous customers, four had used us as an attendee, and five were referrals from attendees or speakers.
• If you’ve ever read my personal blog, you’ve probably picked up that one of the major goals was for CrowdVine to be financially self-sufficient from the start. If this sounds like a strange goal you either live very close to Silicon Valley or very far away. When we were in beta we never had revenue booked more than six weeks out. As of today, we’ve booked 80% of every dollar we plan to spend this year including salary, hosting, contracting, everything. Not bad for a product that only officially launched last November.

So what’s next? We have two goals.

#1. We will improve our self-service product and we have an announcement about that tomorrow.

#2. Everything about the conference/meeting/event social experience is going to get better. We’ve made it much easier for people to meet. We’re going to make it even easier. And along the way we’re going to bring in some of the other social experiences at the conference, helping people share ideas and amplifying the conversation so that it reaches people who weren’t able to attend.