Tag Archives: crowdvine

13th Jul, 2007

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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

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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.

10th Jul, 2007

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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 – with only six weeks to piece it all together. This, as much as anything, emphasized for me what a great job O’Reilly 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

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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.

14th Jun, 2007

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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.

2nd May, 2007

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CrowdVine open for beta users

CrowdVine is ready for beta users. This is my roll-your-own social-network site. In a few clicks, you can create and customize a social network for your group or community. The service and hosting are free.

There’s a lot I’m excited about here, the potential for commodity social network software to connect people in niche communities and of course CrowdVine, my first business.

Social Networks Deserve to be First Class Social Software

When people talk about the types of social software I want them to list blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networks. We’ve all had enough experience with Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook to know that this class of software is extremely useful. Turning social network software into a commodity means it can be treated as a stand alone class of software.

Social Network Evolution

You can’t predict all the ways that niche social networking software will be useful (but I will list all the ways I know of in a second). Just like people came to understand blogging as a distributed conversation rather than merely a light-weight publishing tool, people are going to find unexpected uses for social network software.

One purpose that I enthusiastically recommend is events. Throw-away social networks are unbelievably fantastic for helping people connect at conferences. My entire page of press clippings comes from people who loved using CrowdVine to connect at the SoCon conference. Also check out PodCamp Atlanta and Maker Faire.

I’ve also had good luck using social networks to reconnect alumni. The Graduates of O’Reilly network is like a more personal version of LinkedIn. I also started one for former teammates on my college’s cross country team. That network was so successful and so accurately recreated the locker room experience that I had to rush out my privacy features so that I could make those pages private.

Simplicity Helps Social Software

My vision for social network software is to put the people front and center. There’s huge value in helping people craft an identity and then helping them connect with each other. I’m sure there’s room for several visions for this type of software. Mine is simplicity.

Business Model

People often ask what my business model is. I’m dead set on avoiding outside investment–it detracts from the type of company I want to build. So far everything is self-funded and I’m going to continue with that. While I was building the site I took some work on the side and now that it’s more functional I’m transitioning to CrowdVine related consulting work.

But I also want to make sure to always offer a free ad-supported version. For one thing, having more public feedback will lead to more polished software. More importantly I want to build software that people makes a difference for lots of people. If the ads pay for the servers then I’m sticking with the dual consulting/ad-supported model.

Dreaming of something better

One of the goals of CrowdVine is to connect you to people that share your passions so that you can lead a happier and more successful life. I’ve already had that experience just by building CrowdVine. My passion is for building software and by starting my own business I’m now connected to the people who can get excited about my software, the users. When it’s your software and your users even the tiniest code change can become incredibly fulfilling. If you have a passion, I can’t recommend highly enough that you take the time to find and connect with the people who share that passion.

I’m calling this release beta while I work out some kinks. But I know there’s enough working bits to give you a good experience. So go ahead, bang on it!

15th Apr, 2007

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Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo

I’m going to be part of the Flooding the Social Networks: The State of the Union on SNS Tech panel at Web 2.0 Expo, Tuesday 8:30am.

There’s going to be some folks on the panel who are even more interesting and famous than I am (imagine!). Based on the back channel emails I can say confidently that this is Web 2.0 Expo’s must-see session. Here are the actual luminaries:

Lev Grossman, sci-fi author, Time magazine author, and Time nerd culture blogger, will moderate.

Denise Paolucci, general speaker-to-users over on LiveJournal.

Emily Greer, co-founder of Kongregate, an online hub for user submitted Flash games.

Konstantin Guericke, CEO of jaxtr and co-founder of LinkedIn.

Larry Halff, founder of Ma.gnolia.com and bay area foodie.

I think the format’s going to be pretty free flowing, but we did get some questions to ponder ahead of time. Here are some quick answers

Given the new opportunities that these vast social networks provide, how can you design services for social networks?
Design your service so that it hits one of danah boyd’s life stages for people using social media.

If you’re designing a social network or social web site, what trends, best practices, or ideas are important and worth following?
Think multi platform/device. Twitter takes off each time they add a platform: SMS, web, RSS, web.

Which are worth avoiding like the common cold?
Feature-bloat.

As a side note, some readers may be wondering what I’m doing on a social networks panel. Well I did help launch O’Reilly Connection, a social network for techies. And I was a part of several social software sites, Odeo, Twitter, and Wesabe. But the real reason has to do with how I’m listed in the program:

Tony Stubblebine, Lead Software Engineer, Crowdvine

What’s this? Did I change jobs AGAIN?!? Yup. I don’t know where the Lead Software Engineer title came from — I guess somebody googled me and crafted a title from three different jobs. I’m actually the founder.

CrowdVine is a roll-your-own social network company. The idea is to make it easy for anyone to create and customize a social network for niche communities. The thing about niche social networks is that many of the most passionate niches aren’t big enough to get focused commercial attention but they don’t need commercial attention because they’re filled with passionate people who are fantastic candidates to setup and run a community. Some communities are best served with a message board, but other communities really need a way to connect people. Enter CrowdVine.

It’s in unofficial beta, moves into official beta May 1, and launches mid-June. The dates have everything to do with how I’m (self) funding this. That’s a topic for another post.