DISQUS

Dom, you have a great memory (or a great journal). Either way, I'm glad you wrote all this down, because I'm not able to keep it straight in my head.

There are two things that still amaze me about the early days.

One, no pundit gave us any credit at all. If you were an early user, Twitter's future success seemed obvious. It just felt powerful. But every journalist seemed stuck on measuring us against past products according to a feature list, not realizing that the only feature that mattered was people.

Two, Odeo was made up of a lot of past and mostly present company founders, Noah (audioblogger, odeo), Ev (blogger, odeo, twitter), you (this and dollarapp), adam (71miles and trazzler), tim (infectious), biz (twitter), jack (twitter), and me (crowdvine). That's eight and doesn't even count the major open source and community projects that rabble, kellan, and blaine have started. I think we needed that many rockstars to turn the middling opportunity we had in podcasting into the major opportunity that Twitter has.

Again, great write-up.

Great list Julius! I'll definitely be passing this on to my customers.

Jure makes a good point. What's missing. CrowdVine could add alumni lists. That would be interesting. What else do people think is needed?

Great list. I especially appreciate the list of bloggers, as I've been wondering who the other thoughtful writers were in this space.

Yes, that seems unnecessarily crummy, even for Java. This is the problem with adopting one feature from Perl without also adopting the supporting philosophy of making text handling extremely easy. Imagine if you were matching Windows file paths, you'd be using four slashes.

I've got to take issue with your comment that the price is expensive for a tool to make networking better at conferences. For conferences that are pulling in $1-2M and are charging $1-2k per attendee, it doesn't take very many happy attendees to make up the cost of the network. If a specific tool can make the professional networking worth the trip for five or so attendees, then the cost was worthwhile.

It's a valid question though, about whether they're more effective than a Ning or compelling enough to draw people out of LinkedIn.

CrowdVine is in this space also, and our data says definitely. We can change the networking experience for a few hundred or thousand attendees.

We also have self-service options starting at free for conferences that don't have major budgets. Ning makes networks for hanging out, like personalized MySpaces. But conference attendees just want to meet. That's what we're good at.

Nice post, though as a provider of niche networks I'd say that when we import external social graphs we're actually more interested in quantity than quality. That's because we're recommending people you might want to add to your contacts. I think most niche sites have this quality: they automatically filter your social graph by virtue of having a niche membership. Currently your gmail address book is much more interesting to us than your LinkedIn contacts (for import, they're equal for export).

However, we're moving into a world of identity subscriptions though. For example your CrowdVine profile subscribes to your twitter and blog updates so that your local identity stays current. At some point that subscription model will hit contacts as well. That's when the quality of contacts starts to matter again because we can launch features like "automatically add people to your contacts who are connected to you on LinkedIn."

I think this second phase still has some social issues to work through. For instance, what is the value of adding someone as a friend on the Web 2.0 Expo CrowdVine? It's to say "hello" and notify them that you'll be attending as well. So your goal is for a notification to go out. So in the future, you'll add someone as a contact on LinkedIn and then they'll receive ten emails from ten different services asking them to add you as a contact. That could be a bit much.

Thank you Xavier for this. It's an excellent job and gets at the heart of what we're trying to accomplish!

And you're right about the smoke. We're hoping to show some fire soon.

Fixed. Thanks for the report.

There are some positives for entrepreneurs. We've been doing a lot more business with Europeans who, because of the falling dollar, don't blink at our rates. I don't think things will be entirely peachie if the US economy tanks, but for now being a cheap outsourced service provider is good for bootstrapping. My simplistic view of outsourcing is that you send out your most menial or highly specified development. I wonder if that dynamic changes when you're outsourcing to a community that was born and bred for innovation.

#2 If you licensed your content Creative Commons would you be giving explicit permission for aggregators to do what you describe? And how many people who've already licensed their content CC would scream if they found someone doing this?