When we go on a blogging hiatus it’s usually because we’re doing a lot of client work. It’s been 20 days since our last post and that’s exactly what’s happened here. We’re busy! Thank you so much to all our wonderful customers for making this the case. The first five months of 2008 have seen a steady stream of records and growth for both our business and our conferences.

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.

There’s lots going on with CrowdVine these days, much of which deserves full blog posts. However, you’ll just have to make do with this burst of mini-updates:

Full To-Meet Lists.
We’ve been experimenting in our conference product with a take off of the friend concept that we called “want-to-meet.” It indicated an aspiration to meet someone and many people have used that feature as the opening to in-person meetings. Now we’ve blown it out into a major feature. People you mark as “want-to-meet” get notifications indicating your interest, they show up on your to-meet list on your My Network page, anyone from the list that’s in a session with you shows up on that session page (so you can track them down before/afterward), and you can check them off your to-meet list once you’ve met.

OpenID/Facebook
We now have OpenID working with our Facebook friend importer. Sorry it took so long.

CrowdVine Twitter Account
Want to follow updates about CrowdVine? Follow us on Twitter.

Big Thanks!
A huge thanks to some wonderful customers this month: JISC, Web 2.0 Expo, ApacheCon, MX, IA Summit. We loved working with you!

Activity Lists
Long time CrowdVine users may remember that our old network home pages had comments and blog posts separated and that it often looked like you were talking to yourself. Also, the blog posts tended to get lost. Now they’re combined into one list, blog posts pop back up if they get comments, and posting a comment on your own comment wall doesn’t look so weird.

Improved Calendar
We added popups and track coloring to the calendar. The popups make it easier to browse the list without having to click through for more info.

Session Feedback
We added a feedback option to the calendar. Now there’s five star ratings for sessions and speakers, as well as free-form reviews. Feedback on the feedback feature has been positive so far. It’s simple enough that people actually use it, but also seems to be telling a pretty accurate story.

Web2Open
Along with Sarah Milstein, I organized the unconference track (Web2Open) at Web 2.0 Expo. It was a lot of fun! And the attendees gave us good feedback. Here’s Sarah’s writeup of our favorite session, Speed Q&A.

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.

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.

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.