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.

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.

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.