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.

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!

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.