The readers of BusinessWeek have voted CrowdVine Best of the Web in the Social Networking Tools category. We’re slide 18 in the Readers Choice section. Thanks BusinessWeek readers!
25th Sep, 2007
Yearly Archives: 2007
25th Sep, 2007
Four Tips for Conference Social Networking
I posted some tips for conference social networking to the Future of Web Apps network. I think they’re applicable to anyone using CrowdVine for Conferences.
A great conference happens when everyone is having fantastic hallway conversations. We setup CrowdVine networks to make it easier for you to find people in the hallway. If you’ve never used a social network at a conference (or even if you have) here are four tips for making the most of it.
1. Find people you want to meet
You can search, you can browse by tag, or you can browse other people’s contacts. For example, if you need help at work implementing OpenID, you should search the network for OpenID and introduce yourself to the OpenID experts. If you have a new Rails plugin that you want to publicize, then you should make a point of meeting all the other people who tagged themselves “ruby on rails”. If you want to do business deals, then you might want to browse the “CEO” tag.
2. Make yourself visible
Use a recognizable profile photo. You’ll be surprised how many people recognize you and introduce themselves.
Then take a few minutes to fill out your profile and answer the profile questions. You just need to give enough information for other people to understand your expertise and interests.
3. Contact people
If you mark someone as a fan, they’ll show up in your network. It’s the digital equivalent of waving hello. You can also track the their blog posts and popular sessions from your My Network tab.
If you mark someone as want-to-meet, you’re expressing some interest in actually talking face-to-face. They’ll receive an email and at least know that you’d like to introduce yourself. That’s miles better than interrupting someone’s conversation and then explaining who you are.
For anybody that you want to connect with, try leaving a comment. That can be a great endorsement for the person. It’s also a terrific way to ask a question or explain why you want to meet.
4. Recognize that there are no obligations
People come to conferences for different reasons. Not everyone you contact is going to contact you back. Likewise, you shouldn’t feel obligated to connect with everyone who contacts you.
Bonus tip #5. Enjoy yourself! This is social software.
31st Aug, 2007
Justin Watt is the new Clifford Stoll
I hope that reference isn’t too outdated. I essentially learned Unix from Clifford Stoll’s account of tracking down the hacker who hacked into his systems, The Cuckoo’s Egg.
Now my friend Justin Watt is on a mission, first tracking down the guy who hacked his blog and then outing a shady search engine marketer.
And who is this Brant Walker? Apparently a recent graduate of Platt College in San Diego. A quick scan of his web portfolio turns up a parody site called Nicotine Island. Hmm, where have I seen Nicotine Island before? Oh yeah, a post by one beverlybimbo in a Yahoo Groups for Smoking and Tobacco Hobbies.
I think I can reconstruct what happened here. Brant Walker, using the fake identity Julie Winfield, is trying to drive traffic to his Rotten Neighbors site. He checks out the Alexa Movers & Shakers list and discovers my site listed number 4 because I got dugg last week.
He follows Alexaâs link to my homepage and clicks to my about page, grabs my email address, and sends me the email at the top. How am I doing so far? Letâs take a look back at my referrer log entries from just before 4:30pm yesterday (when I got the email), the ones that I previously thought held no clues.
I love reading this sort of stuff.
28th Aug, 2007
CrowdVine Reviews
Here are a couple of nice reviews of CrowdVine, including two by TechCrunch. Most people think the service is simple and easy to use. That’s great. A lot of competitors are tackling this space by creating social networks with loads of features. I want to do something simple that’s easy to combine with other services. Chris Messina called that “Small pieces loosely joined,” after combining CrowdVine with Pibb and PBWiki for BarCampBlock.
Roll Your Own Social Network with CrowdVine
9 Ways to Build Your Social Network
Setting your own network is dead simple. You just need to pick a name, pick some profile questions, and then send out invites with a personalized message. You network is hosted at name.crowdvine.com Profiles consist of a photo, location, personal link, description, blog posts, and the questions the creator of the network chooses. Members can also incorporate RSS feeds from another blog, photo stream, or social bookmarking site.
CrowdVine.com — Create Your Own Social Network
There are many reasons to create a network and with CrowdVine.com creating a network is easy. The homepage takes you through three easy steps. First design your network, basically choose your color, there isn’t a huge choice with designing your network at the moment. Then choose your profile questions, this is where you make your network unique, deciding what questions will be in your profile.
Facebook? Why Not CREATE YOUR OWN Social Network?!
This service is pretty straight forward to set up [and] is much less complicated and cleaner [than other sites].
There are no annoying Google Ads placed on the interface, and the simple way people can set up and place their information in their profiles will be appealing to even the most non-tech savvy group out there.
28th Aug, 2007
Kongregate/Xbox-360/Wii Showdown
One of my pet peeves for reviews of social applications is to base the review off of a comparison of features. The worst example I’ve seen of this was TechCrunch’s Dodgeball vs. Twitter Showdown in which they declared Dodgeball the clear winner because it had more features. Three weeks later the Dodgeball founders quit because Google wasn’t giving them any support.
The review should have started by looking at which service had the most active users and then looked at which features enabled that activity.
In that vein, here’s my review of three popular gaming options. I own an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii. I almost never play the 360 anymore because I don’t have time. The Wii gets a little bit of play when visitors come over. However, I play Kongregate every day.
The 360 has the best graphics and the most depth in gameplay. The Wii is the most fun. But Kongregate is the one I play more, a lot more. It’s the clear winner. It’s light years better than the Wii or 360, at least if you judge by observing usage. But why?
It wins because of convenience. I’m already on my laptop. When I want a break I don’t have to get out of my work chair, find a controller, find replacement batteries for the controller, find the game disc, and futz with three remotes. I think that’s the entire reason.
My two favorite games are Desktop Tower Defence and Boxhead. I also like to play their weekly challenges highlighting new games.
15th Aug, 2007
Against the Grain
When I started working for myself I made a conscious decision to trust my gut. If it was the opposite of what other people were doing but my gut gave approval, then I’d do it.
For the most part that’s worked out great. I love owning a profitable business. All my options are open and that’s because I built it without investors or debt. Around here everyone is taking investment, going into debt, or building products with no revenue. Not all of those people end up happy.
One gut decision that didn’t turn out well was choosing a hosting company for CrowdVine. Everyone told me to go with ServerBeach but I chased some minor cost savings at CalPop and ServerAxis.
CalPop was awful the first month with lots of downtime. Lately they’ve just been a little disorganized but basically functional. I still host RateMyDanceMoves there but couldn’t trust them for professional work. Then I tried ServerAxis because they had a cheap VPS with 4GB of RAM and the underlying server was on RAID giving my data an extra dose of protection. A month later their hard drives crashed and they lost everything (I only lost a little bit of work). It took me five emails to get the complete story. Thankfully I never had a chance to host CrowdVine there.
Now CrowdVine is hosted with ServerBeach. I love them. I wish I’d made this decision a year ago. (BTW, you save $100 and I get $250 if you sign up with this code: U7S59BJ6R3)
Here’s the difference between the two decisions. A lot of people complain about taking investment or about dealing with debt. I haven’t heard anyone complain about ServerBeach. From now on I resolve to take glowing recommendations more seriously, even if my gut says otherwise.
14th Aug, 2007
BarCampBlock CrowdVine
Coolness. Last night Tara Hunt invited the BarCampBlock participants to join a BarCampBlock CrowdVine network to do some pre-event networking.
BarCampBlock is this weekend (Aug 18/19) in Palo Alto. I’d go but I’m the minister for my sister’s best friend’s wedding and this weekend is the Vegas bachelor party.
Also, I’m pretty sure we’re going to do an icalico integration for this one.
13th Aug, 2007
Time Enough For CrowdVine
Fred Wilson’s Time Is On Your Side, Yes It Is is a nice take on how many successful startups ran like a marathon and not a sprint. Starts with this quote from Marc Andreessen:
“Time is (in my opinion) the hugely unappreciated and unanalyzed part of the whole startup experience.”
A big part of why I built CrowdVine to have revenue from the start (rather than look for investors) was because I wanted to surround myself with people who took the long view.
This was also a big part of the No Investors Ever! Own Your Biz. talk at Foo.
30th Jul, 2007
All My Friends Go WIth Union Square
Twitter and Wesabe both took funding from Union Square Ventures. Intriguing. So I did some research and found out two interesting things. One, they are located in NYC, not on Union Square in SF.
Two, they write really excellent posts about the companies they invest in.
Here’s Fred Wilson’s take on Twitter
There is something really powerful about public, asynchronous text communications where a reply is not expected. A great example is blogging. You blog something and it’s out there on the Internet for public consumption. Others read it and they either comment or create their own blog post in reaction. Collectively, we engage in a discussion.
…
Twitter provides a platform for banter that blogging doesn’t and it’s available in so many places via IM, mobile text messaging, or the Web that it induces a different sort of behavior. Twitter encourages people to adapt and invent behavior to suit their needs.
Synchronous communication wasn’t working for me, not so much that it failed to function but that I failed to use it. Twitter is now the only online way that I communicate socially. No emails. No IM.
Here’s what Brad Burnham said about Wesabe.
If you manage your expenses on a web based service you have the opportunity to contribute to community and to take advantage of its collective wisdom. Allowing your service provider to aggregate transaction data anonymously makes it possible for that provider to deliver a service that is better than desktop software in a number of important ways.
1) Providing very useful analytics, that compare your behavior to others like you. Do you spend more or less than most folks in your community for cable television, or lawn care?
2) More information about the vendors you use every day. Is it going to cost you more to bounce a check at Wells Fargo or at Wachovia? The answer turns out to be less than obvious.
3) Information about how others feel about service providers in your world. It turns out that many folks are willing to say how they feel about the places they spend their money. Would it help you to know that of the three dry cleaners in your neighborhood, one had a 100% satisfaction rate?
4) Peer produced data categorization and cleansing. I have given up using my annual gold card statement from American Express, because half of the vendors are listed as an unrecognizable string of characters, and even when they get the vendor right, they often do not put that vendor in the right category. Once I contribute my data to a co-op, a lot of these things are fixed much more easily. If anyone participating in the community recognizes an incomprehensible string of characters as âWhole Foodsâ and makes the change in their account, everyone in the community benefits from their contribution. After three or four people do it, the service provider can begin making the change. If most people categorize expenses in certain ways, the service provider can usefully suggest categories, and auto-fill entries to speed you on your way.
Wesabe is the only service to ever give me a useful view of my data. It’s not a competition over features, the other competitors flat out fail.
23rd Jul, 2007
Regular Expression Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition
The second edition of my Regular Expression Pocket Reference is now available on Amazon.
I added chapters for Ruby, Apache (including Rewrite Rules), and a cookbook for common recipes.
13th Jul, 2007
Exports and Customers: CrowdVine Changelog
Apparently I haven’t written a changelog in this calendar year. My boss would be so mad.
vCard export
You can now export all your contacts as vcard so that you can add all your new friends to your address book. Right now the list is all mutual friends. You don’t get to see someone’s email address unless they friended you back. That’ll change once the privacy controls get beefed up. I used the excellent vpim gem for this.
OPML
OPML is a format for (among other things) sharing a list of RSS feeds. Many feed readers let you import a list of new feeds to follow in this format. CrowdVine now exports OPML for contact list, tag page, and network. You could add a folder for everyone at foo camp or Maker Faire. Found two excellent sites for icons and validation
Cool Networks
I already blogged about Providence Geeks. I’m also psyched that Terrie set up a network for her Citizen Science Projects community. That’s where citizens like you and me are recruited to collect data for real scientific research. I’d love for one of these people to take me out in the field.
Customers
I want to build software according to my sensibilities and standards so it’s been very important to me that I keep the business privately owned and get to profitability as soon as possible. Good news on that front, I’m profitable through the end of the year (as in my rent is paid) and even close to paying a portion of someone else’s rent. CrowdVine is providing the infrastructure behind an exciting new business that’s launching at OSCON. And after our extremely successful Foo Camp experience, Pathable and I are teaming up to tackle the conference market.
12th Jul, 2007
Providence Geeks
I love the way my friend Brian Jepson is using social software to organize a Providence Geeks community.
They’ve got a blog, a job board, a flickr pool, and now a crowdvine network.
When I lived in St. Louis I thought I had to move back to the bay area in order to connect with a passionate tech community. Brian’s showing that a little software and a little effort can turn a few people into a strong community.
11th Jul, 2007
Foo Camp Brain Dump
Foo Camp was great, better than every year except the first. The sessions I went to were all really fantastically interesting and I wanted to get some of my mental-notes and scraps of paper stored somewhere accessible.
How to eat like a caveman.
Eric Wilhelm of Instructables put together a great round table about diet and in particular the Paleolithic diet which is rich in wild game, fish, some wild fruits, nuts, and vegetables. My notes have a bunch of reading material. S. Boyd Eaton. Loren Cordain’s Paleo Diet. The China Study. Healthy at 100. Marion Nestle’s Food Politics.
I’m about half way through The China Study which has a broad range of research showing that animal protein promotes cancer growth and a host of other diseases. As a result I’ve been eating a diet that’s mostly veggies, fruits, nuts, and beans. I feel great and don’t have the hunger pangs, binges, or food comas that I used to have. I still need to reconcile why people in the discussion were eating so much meat if they’ve read this book.
Continuous Partial Attention.
Kathy Sierra started a discussion around whether living in a world of continuous partial attention was going to lead to a world without experts because nobody will have the focus to become great. Twitter seemed to be catching a lot of the blame. IMHO, declining school athletic and music programs could easily be a bigger culprit (that’s where I learned to focus). I’d like to see data that there is in fact a declining per/capita number of experts. I wonder if people won’t naturally adapt. I turn my email and IM off when I need to focus. Best phrase was Blaine’s “Twitter produces ambient intimacy.”
Surgeons don’t get surgeon’s block.
Cory Doctorow explanation to his students about how writer’s block is bunk. I keep that phrase in my head now to avoid paralysis (notice four blog posts in three days).
No investors ever.
Don MacAskill and I led a “No Investors Ever! Build to Own” discussion. There were a lot of people there who were quite happy owning their own profitable businesses (Don included). People who weren’t happy were struggling with the idea that they were missing opportunities by not taking investment.
dopplr
I finally got on dopplr, the social network for travellers. It’s sweet.
10th Jul, 2007
More From Pathable
Shelly from Pathable wrote a great summary of the social software package we put together for Foo. I especially like her description of the collaboration:
we were, individuals from five separate organizations, collaborating to create a fully featured, unique social networking experience for Foo Camp attendees â with only six weeks to piece it all together. This, as much as anything, emphasized for me what a great job OâReilly has done in creating an environment that generates the level of trust and shared passion that enables this sort of effort to succeed.
10th Jul, 2007
Social Conference Software at Foo Camp
The folks from Pathable, CrowdVine (me) and iCalico got together at Foo Camp to prototype a social software package for conferences. We had a lot of fun and got enough traction for the concept that we’re putting together an official package for other conferences/events.
Here’s how it works. CrowdVine provides a social network which let’s people do some pre-event networking by putting names to faces and arranging for in-event meetings and then do some post-event networking where people follow up with the people they met during the event. Pathable provides badges or badge stickers that use their social matching algorithms to recommend maches and opposites (a fun group to meet) and groupings into colors and tags. The badges make for great conversation starters. iCalico provides social conference scheduling. You can mark which sessions you’re going to and also see what sessions your friends are interested in.
Here’s what Scott Berkun had to say after using the package at Foo:
Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.
If you know anyone who runs conferences or events I’d love to talk to them.
9th Jul, 2007
39 Ways to Look at Social Networks
Slashdot posted an article over the weekend on 35 Perspectives on Online Social Networking. Things like:
2. The youth perspective
Social networking sites are places that help young people be young and let them âpracticeâ youth. Therefore, the sites are mainly a reflection of youth culture.
3. The friendship perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people can maintain and nurse their existing (offline) friendships and create new (online) friendships.
4. The identity perspective
Social networking sites are spaces for identity construction. Here, young people are continuously constructing, re-constructing and displaying their self-image and identity. Also, the network sites make them co-constructors of each otherâs identities.
It reminded me of what I thought was the best part of danah boyd’s Incantations for Muggles keynote at ETech.
I want to address four key life stages that i think are relevant to folks interested in social media:
1) Identity formation and role-seeking (aka youth)
2) Integration and coupling (aka 20somethings)
3) Societal contribution (aka “adults”)
4) Reflection and storytelling (aka retirees)
I’ve been using that list to address adults who say things like “I don’t have time to hang out on a social network.” Not every network is about hanging out. Nobody ever hangs out on LinkedIn. That’s a network for adults in phase #3. That’s also been the phase where I’ve seen the most successful uses of CrowdVine networks. People who create networks for conferences or for niche professional communities are trying to be more social because being more social helps them be more effective contributors (and a little bit because being social feels good).
The 35 categories might be good when you’re categorizing the behavior of an individual social network user but danah’s categories are a lot more useful when you’re trying to categorize the value of a particular network.
5th Jul, 2007
Fluther: Best Boss Ever
The What makes a great boss? thread on Fluther made me want to be a boss again.
I currently report to the best boss I’ve ever had and here’s why:
1) He’s funny. Really funny. He’s in a serious, hardcore job (he’s the COO) but never takes himself too seriously and has no need to pull power issues.
2) He gives me guidance and direction, while still treating me like an equal.
3) He solicits my feedback and opinion on serious issues, regardless of my position in the food chain.
4) He always recognizes contributions -and not in a cheesy-here’s-something-to-hang-on-your-wall-way, but in the middle of meetings “Cristi had a great idea for this Cancer Center and….”
5) He gives me responsibilities that are slightly over my head so that I can “play up” – offers me support to get through them, and lets me take full credit for completing them. That boosts my self-confidence and skill level, and drives me to take on more, and do better work.
6) When we have our one-on-one meetings, he treats me like I’m the only employee he has, and does everything he can to boost my skills.
7) He gives me a lot of exposure- i.e. he drags me into meetings so that I can see what goes on there, and if I express an interest in something he’s doing or a particular project, he drags me a long there too so I can see the inner workings.
8) I have a budget for “development” and he encourages me to pursue education constantly. It’s not huge, but he has me constantly look at my current skill level, determine where I’d like to be – and then I prioritize which classes I should take to fill in the gaps.
9) He always lets me know how my work ties into the big picture. He gives me whole story about where our organization is going, then the background strategy behind it. This way, even if I’m doing some small project, I feel like it’s important.
10) He’s created an environment where people can ask questions without ever feeling stupid. He asks them himself – so this totally eliminates the intimidation factor.
20th Jun, 2007
Rails XSS Filter
I was pushed to put XSS protections into CrowdVine when one of the Foo Camper’s released this XSS crack into the Foo Camp social network. It causes a person to friend everyone in the network and then inserts itself into your profile. It was brutal. Worse it was a very simple and readable 49 lines of code. I took one glance at it and realized that even I know enough javascript to write one of these.
Looking around I saw two approaches for Rails. Run Safe ERB and force yourself to validate each individual input or run Rick Olson’s white list plugin.
I decided to use the white_list plugin to clean all values in params. It required a little bit of tweaking. Here’s the details.
Install the white list plugin:
script/plugin install -x http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/white_list/
Edit vendor/plugins/white_list/init.rb so that white_list is available in the Controller:
require 'white_list_helper' ActionController::Base.send :include, WhiteListHelper
Add a filter to application.rb in order to walk the params hash:
before_filter :sanitize_params def sanitize_params # TODO: 2007-06-20 -- I found that this didn't # work when called with params instead of @params. I assume # I'm clueless in some important regard. (Many important regards?) @params = walk_hash(@params) if @params and !site_owner? end def walk_hash(hash) hash.keys.each do |key| if hash[key].is_a? String hash[key] = white_list(hash[key]) elsif hash[key].is_a? Hash hash[key] = walk_hash(hash[key]) elsif hash[key].is_a? Array hash[key] = walk_array(hash[key]) end end hash end def walk_array(array) array.each_with_index do |el,i| if el.is_a? String array[i] = white_list(el) elsif el.is_a? Hash array[i] = walk_hash(el) elsif el.is_a? Array array[i] = walk_array(el) end end array end
Does this look right to people? Is there a more idiomatic ruby/rails way to do this? I’m a bit worried about how this will perform on very large chunks of data or on deeply nested hashes.
15th Jun, 2007
Fluther: Social questions and answers
My friend Ben just re-launched his social question and answer site, Fluther, with a nifty new design. The idea is that anyone can ask a question and get answers from other people in the community. Or you can just browse questions that other people are asking. I had two nagging questions answered in the first few minutes:
How do I make my sneakers less stinky?
and
What’s the shelf life of beer?
Another thing that I admire is how far they’ve gotten without taking any investment or debt. They own the whole thing so they have a lot more options for turning it into a profitable business.
14th Jun, 2007
Pathable In-Person Social Matching
Pathable had a very successful first deploy, helping people make professional connections at BizJam. See their writeup, Pathable Social Matching at BizJam: It works!
“I met two people on my most similar list, and one opposite. One of the similar people I already knew from Mind Camp, and we just chatted for a bit. The other guy is also a local Python programmer working in Django (what I wrote the Noonhat site in) and he’s on the mailing list for my user group meeting. ;) Certainly similar. When I met the lady who was my opposite, it was like oil & water. Wasn’t even able to have a minimal conversation to figure out what she does.”
I’ve had very similar experiences using CrowdVine for conferences. People want to connect but there are a lot of barriers, both informational and social, to making meaningful connections. We’ve teamed up for Foo Camp to see how our software plays together. CrowdVine will provide the pre- and post-event networking and Pathable will extend that into face-to-face interactions.
Congrats to Peter and Shelly for a successful launch.