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In the past couple of months we’ve been devoting all of our energy to our Pathable Beta so we could do some private testing on a few events this coming month. As a part of the process we did a few interviews with event organizers when we were down at E-Tech this past week—very illuminating.

The core technologies and concepts behind Pathable, namely the tagging and social matching algorithms as well as the social badge concepts, were developed this past year and tested at several events, including O’Reilly Media’s FOO Camp, Seattle’s BizJam and the Thingamajiggr technology event. In the early stages, the social networking facility was provided by a partnership with Crowdvine. We decided a while ago however to really leverage our social matching and face-to-face integration points we needed to produce the entire end-to-end experience internally.

I’m really excited about how the Pathable online directory is looking. I’ve been obsessed with mapping out social spaces for years now and I really think this is going to be a great way to do so for not only events, but any community of practice.

This is a picture of our badges….produced on PDFs, easy to print! We have a few other cool designs in the works. People really, really do care about how they are being presented to others. I’m always surprised by how so many event badges seem like an afterthought.

We threw a housewarming/birthday party at our house last weekend, so a couple of weeks ago I sent out a message to my friends saying “Are you interested in finding your Party Soulmate? Well, at Waggle we’re working on this project Pathable to help people meet each other at events…and we thought hey why not experiment with our friends to see how it’s working? If you fill out this profiling questionnaire, we’ll tell you who’s your party soulmate.”

An amazing 65 people filled out the pathable profile, so i spent the last week or so hunkering down working on our similarity algorithms. We then made badges showing people not only their two party “soulmates” (who’s most similar) but also their party “nemesis” (who’s most dissimilar). People also had the option of displaying their tags. We were a little nervous people would find it strange to wear badges at a casual social event, but figured it was a good sign when people who didn’t fill out the questionnaire were clamoring in line to have me make them one on the spot.

It certainly served it’s purpose, generating a lot of conversations and excuses for people to seek each other out and talk. It was good to experiment on a “known group” because we could see where the similarity algorithm was working, and where it could be improved. There was an interesting outsider effect: those who were new to town, or simply had less in common with the crew, were listed as a nemesis a few times. One such shy person said at first she was put off by the experience but came to appreciate the increased opportunities to flirt with cute boys or girls.

Everyone, though, seemed intrigued by whom they were paired with, saying that it seemed accurate in a strange way. One person was glad that he finally had mathematical proof that a particular person was in fact his diametric opposite!

We did a graph visualization for the party as well (see pic) but we have a ways to go on this: it’s an interesting challenge, distilling a crowd to it’s essential clusters/memes and representing them in a simple, compelling way.