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Saturday we deployed Pathable for the first time at a professional event, BizJam 2007, organized by BizNik!  BizNik is a group of independent professionals for whom networking is an important aspect of finding clients and building collaborative relationships.  The tag line for BizNik is "business networking that doesn't suck".  They were very receptive to our experimenting with integrating Pathable's social matching service into the event badge. 

Almost 200 people completed the profile, breaking down into about six meaningful clusters.  We did some interviews during the event to better understand how people were experiencing the badges (with the help of Ben Lidgus).  People on the whole really liked it.  They reported largely paying attention to the list of similar and opposite names on each badge, somehow this was much more compelling than the tags themselves or the color clusters.  Randy Engstrom, director of the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, said it was great the way it took all that "online social networking stuff" and brought it back into face to face interactions.  We heard some interesting stories about how it helped folks meet each other.  From Brian Dorsey, creator of Noonhat: 

I think the badges worked very well. I saw a lot of people talking about them, and trying to figure out their similarities or differences. Fun, fun!

Personally, I started several conversations when I saw my name on other people's badges.

Also, 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. Maybe she was just busy right then?

Special thanks to Dan and Lara who were brave enough to let us try out our new technology at their event, Brian Dorsey, who helped us get people registered onsite, and Nadja Haldimann, an independent designer who works with BizNik, who did the badge design!   

It's always a lot of fun when you first see one of your ideas actually become real!

I spoke at Ignite Seattle last night. As always Brady Forrest did a great job putting together a great line up. The quality of the presentations has definitely gone up, perhaps people are getting used to the format. Jordan Schwartz talk on beekeeping was a big hit, and Keith Schorsch (formerly of Amazon) talked about how he got into the health social networking space because of his own experience with Lyme disease. Keith’s project Peer Wisdom is one of the one’s we consult with at Waggle Labs, it’s a great project.

For my presentation I talked about some of the work we’re doing with Pathable. The core idea is to provide people with tools for figuring out whom they should meet at social events: enabling strategic social networking. If you have a limited amount of time available to you, how do you figure out whom you should try and meet? Ideally, you would be able to do a live search query on a room, with questions like “who’s most similar to me, who’s doing really cool things, who’s the most fun” and a bright shiny arrow would appear over their heads.

There have been a few projects that have tried to solve this problem with technological solutions such as badges with RFID chips and proactive displays (see interrelativity) and hand-help devices (see spotme). These technologies are challenging however because most event organizers do not have the time or resources to distribute them to their attendees, they require participants to be standing by a display, and/or people find them cumbersome/distracting to use. For Pathable we are exploring how to integrate some of the more promising social tagging and social networking technologies with lightweight, old school, paper badges. We’re going to do our first full Pathable deployment at BizJam 2007.

If you are interested in participating, fill out a profile on Pathable , we’ll send you updates as we roll out browsing and visualization features.

first pic from expressobuzz