Stubbleblog

Business Innovation Factory put on their annual Collaborative Innovation Summit this week in Rhode Island. For two days some amazing speakers told stories of innovation, highlighted by Walt Mossberg and Mark Cuban on stage (no dancing).

CrowdVine was there, running a social network for the conference. This is the first time we’ve used CrowdVine for a non-tech conference and I’m proud to say it worked great! We’re not just for geeks!

Congrats to the entire staff for putting on such a great conference.

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.

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.

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 “practice” 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 other’s 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.

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!

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.

In the comments of my post Social Network Fatigue is a Red Herring, Jon Udell challenged me to get actual numbers on how many people join more than one social network and how many networks they tend to join. Today I ran across this quote on the Hitwise blog:

the other [non-Myspace] 19 social networks on the chart above received 25.8% of their upstream visits from MySpace. In other words, one in four visits to the 19 other leading social networks came directly from MySpace, demonstrating the vast breadth of its influence among users of most of these other sites.

I first read that as conclusive evidence that there’s a very large group of people who aren’t effected by social network fatigue. But you could also claim that the traffic is coming from users with MySpace fatigue (a fatigue particular to MySpace and in no way damning of the sector) who are searching for a new home. In any case, the rest of the social network sector should be thankful, they’re getting the kind of traffic from MySpace that most web companies hope to get from Google.

Also of note, social network traffic accounts for 6.5% of all internet traffic, is up 11.5% over the last month and 87% over the last year.

The SF Chronicle had a story on online taunting the other day:

Nationwide, more than four in 10 teens have been victims of taunts and threats via social network Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, instant messages and text messages from cell phones, a new survey says. One in eight reported feeling scared enough to stay home from school, according to the survey by the National Crime Prevention Council.

What I want to know is how many of those teens only receive threats and taunts online. A lot of that bullying is probably going on in person. The difference is that the onliine bullying leaves a trail. It reminds me of the parents who sued MySpace, and lost, because their children had been the victims of sexual predators. Is MySpace creating increased crime? Or is it a honeypot that catches crime that would have otherwise been undetected? I say honeypot, but that’s a hard thing to say to the MySpace mothers whose children had been safe up until that point.

Timothy Moenk reports on his experience signing up for the Obama social network and then going to a meetup of Obama supporters.

I enjoyed going to this event because it gave me some perspective on how social networking is going to be impacting the political process. First off, I noticed that many of the people there were meeting face to face for the first time, but already knew each other through my.barackobama.com. For at least a few, this was the first time they had actually met someone in person that they’d first had contact with online. A few mentioned that they had never joined a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook.

Tim’s identified one of the primary use cases for niche social networks, start friendships online in preparation for offline meetings.

I signed up for the network also. I haven’t looked closely at Obama’s policies yet, but on the surface he represents a change to a course where intelligence and diplomacy matters.

Jon Udell and Tim O’Reilly both posted entries recently using the phrase Social Network Fatigue, implying that the friction of joining new social networks was going to slow the adoption of new social networks. That idea is wrong (and it obscures their other point that our social networks could be implicitly calculated from our other internet activities, email and IM).

It’s easy to see that you could improve the social networking experience by creating a way to centrally manage your contact lists or to implicitly generate a social network. I’m not going to deny that, but there’s a lot of things I’m noticing that make me think people who use the phrase Social Network Fatigue don’t have any idea what’s going on with social networks.

1. I look at my own social networks, I’m an active member of Flickr, Twitter, MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, Digg, and netscape. I’ve joined other networks which I now hardly use, not because maintaining my identity is such a chore, but because I wasn’t having any meaningful communication there.

2. I invited my sister and cousin to Twitter (both younger than 23) and they immediately became active users. They’re also both very active MySpacers. I just found out that neither of them invited any friends to Twitter beside me and Sarah. They’re happy to maintain a four person social network and haven’t had any impulse to consolidate networks.

3. I setup a social network for the SoCon conference with a life span of about three weeks (two weeks leadinig up to the conference and one week of followup). I haven’t heard a single person complain about the trouble of inputting yet another profile and collecting yet another batch of friends. On the contrary, attendees seem to have liked the experience very much.

4. The rapid growth of Flixster, a social network for movie lovers, is more evidence that niche social networks are taking off.

Social Networks are communication tools. Some geeks can’t seem to recognize social networks as communication improvement because there’s so much friction around managing friends and identity. They’d taken identity and relationships out of the first suite of communication tools for efficiency, but that’s not what people want. Having identity and relationships are fundamental human activities and fundamental part of communication. Social networks are a big enough improvement in communication that the majority of people aren’t phased at all by the friction of joining new ones.

Eggs setup a blog on dogster. I’m giving him some link love.

I think he was going to write his first post about having the best down-stay in all of Marin Humane’s Family Dog I, but then he had an adventure. Good for him.

Guy Kawasaki just posted 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a lot of mildly valuable use cases and Guy does a good job of enumerating them.

I think any knocks on LinkedIn are based on the expectation that it’s supposed to be extremely useful. If LinkedIn is the professional’s MySpace then professionals should spend as much time hanging on LinkedIn as teenagers spend on MySpace. Once you realize that this is not true, and is never going to be true, then the value of LinkedIn becomes a lot more acceptable.

In the last year I’ve had exactly three positive experiences on LinkedIn. 1. I needed the email address of someone who happened to be in my network. 2. Someone who wanted podcasting advice tracked me down based on my time at Odeo. 3. As a favor I went on a job interview but I went completely unprepared, not even bringing a resume. Turns out my friend had printed out my LinkedIn profile and sent that ahead as a resume.

The PEW Internet and American Life project released Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview.

danah boyd provides summary and commentary:

I would like to highlight the fact that 91% of teens are using social network sites to stay in touch with friends they see in person while only 49% are using them to meet people (ever). I hope that this makes people realize that, for teenagers, these sites are *not* about networking. They are about modeling one’s social network.

Sarah and I are headed to Atlanta for SoCon 07, a Social Media Unconference. I’m looking to connect with people about specialized social networks. Maybe I’ll launch something there =)

Here’s the schedule, although it looks like it’ll be mostly free form like FOOCamp. Here’s the Technorati tag, socon07

This quote from danah boyd’s excellent Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites got me thinking:

While Friending is a social act, the actual collection of Friends and the display of Top Friends provides space for people to engage in identity performance.

Sorry friends, I’m only acting like the person I wish I was when I mark you as a friend. But is anyone measuring my actual friendships? I think Digg and Bloglines have the data, they’re just not doing anything with it. I’ve noticed that I keep Digging the stories of the same few people. Are they my “real” friends? On Bloglines I always read posts from Biz and Ev as soon as I see them. Then there’s another fifty blogs that I haven’t read in months. Bloglines knows the people that I actually like and the people that I’m just pretending to like.

O’Reilly Connection aggregates technical things that people in your network of friends are doing and then provides it as an RSS feed. It’s only got O’Reilly articles, weblogs, codezoo tips, and article/weblog comments so far, but it’s already my favorite feature. Here’s the RSS feed from my network.

Today’s batch of items turned up the secret of project management:

If there’s a secret (and this is what the agile development community has been saying for a while — neither Andy nor I make a secret of that) it’s that you have to be relentlessly honest about what you can and cannot handle. You don’t have to have perfect knowledge, but you have to stop deluding yourself and your customer that changes are free, that you’ve made more progress than you have, and that your initial estimates and guesses are completely right and will never change.

Also, I found out that I’m lovable. Not sure how I feel about that.

I’m working on aggregating more, like external RSS feeds, open source contributions, credit reports and del.icio.us links.

We launched a career-oriented social network, O’Reilly Connection, to a group of FOO’s last Thursday, put fliers in the OSCON bags, and now Tim has publicly announced it.

Here’s a couple of observations.

People are addicted to the friend collection competition. It’s guaranteed site activity. In six months, when traffic starts to slump, we’re going to delete all the friend connections and start a new competition. Seriously! Well, ok, I’m not serious. I’m in fourth, btw, behind Tim O’Reilly, Nat Torkington, and Derek Sivers. Darn that Sivers!

It took two days for the number of connections to exceed the number of sign-ups. We’re now averaging two friends per user.

People want more data! IM, del.icio.us, flickr, more RSS.

Comments are running 50/50 for understanding that Beta means more features coming (people seem fine with Beta meaning buggy). Releasing early has been a fantastic way to get feedback. Maybe Beta is the wrong term, Preview might be better.