Stubbleblog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

This is cool, reality all starz is a competition to challenge “yourself and your friends to accomplish amazing adventures, feats of valor, or works of creative genius.” You go out into the real world and perform real acts like you’re a real human being. Then you submit proof online and receive points from your peers based on how well you did.

Some of the challenges are like party like a rockstar but there’s also a surprising number of people competing in survive a rollover accident.

It’s built by Peter Brown and Shelly Farnham from Waggle Labs. Shelly’s got a really interesting background in the academic side of social software (as a Ph.D and former researcher at Microsoft). Good people. Worth drinking with if you run into them at ETech.

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.

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.

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.