Stubbleblog

The last Future of Web Apps was one of the best conferences of the year — great speakers and great attendees. This year Ryan and the crew over at Carson Systems have committed to super sizing the event. The speakers are huge. The attendees are awesome. And they’ve brought in CrowdVine, Pathable, and icalico to make sure the social aspects are top notch.

Check it out: fowa.crowdvine.com

CrowdVine provides the social network so people can connect before and after the event. Pathable is providing their social matching analysis and badges, and a text-messaging coordination service. And icalico is providing a social session calendaring feature so that you can mark the sessions that are interesting to you and see which sessions are popular within your network.

It’s based the work we did for Foo Camp. We added much better design customization. The contact model is new. Rather than marking contacts as friends (what does that mean in a conference setting?) you can mark fan or want-to-meet. You can finally control email notifications. The Pathable and icalico integrations are tighter. We’ve got OpenID. Basically, we’ve made boatloads of improvements.

It’s not too late to get passes if you can get to London October 3rd-5th.

Thanks to the FOWA staff for choosing us (and to Scott Berkun who put us on their radar).

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.

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.

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.