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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.

Mark Hendrickson on TechCrunch mentions Pathable, our people matching product for events, in a post about a company we’ve partnered with called CrowdVine:

White label social networking platform CrowdVine, which we have covered a couple of times in this past year, has released a new offering called “CrowdVine for Conferences” that further cements its focus of hosting networks meant for conference attendees. CrowdVine has also partnered with Pathable to create custom, physical badges that show tags and likenesses for each attendee.

Pathable is a project we developed for Foo Camp in 2007 and has been operating the background of a few conferences since then including the Future of Web Apps conference in the UK.

I received pictures from Jordan of Pathable at FOWA today. Jordan reports that Pathable was well received at the event.

It inspired me to review the Pathable SMS service usage statistics. Pathable SMS allows people to communicate with each other using ad hoc text messaging groups based on their profile tags. For example, if I added “developer” to my profile I would then receive any text messages sent to the “developer” tag. It’s the second time we’ve ever deployed the service at a large event so we are still learning how people are using it and tweaking the system accordingly. (Messages are publicy posted in the crowdvine FOWA network, by the way.)

Out of all the attendees about 540 had profiles in the FOWA social network in Crowdvine, out of which another 95 added their phone numbers to join the Pathable SMS service. Given these numbers I’m fairly surprised and pleased at the level of usage we observed. 222 messages were recieved, which resulted in approximately 1100 outbound messages. See figure for usage by day. The conference was from Oct 2 to Oct 5.

Below are the messages sent to the “developer” tag. You can see how it was used for coordination.

I broke down the incoming messages by type to gain a better understanding of command usage. We had many of the typical commands for text messaging services, including “who” to see who was in a tag or “tags” to see which tags a person had. Aside from broadcast messages, people largely sent in help which returned the syntax for the rest of the commands. Not too many messages were command errors.

I think the utility of ad hoc, interest-based text messaging groups for large conferences is fairly clear. The challenge for us is helping users develop trust and familiarity with the system to increase usage. Our biggest limiting factor at FOWA was simply the number of people willing to provide their phone number in their profiles. As the system becomes smoother and people develop familiarity and trust with it I imagine usage of Pathable SMS will increase.

We’re happy to announce that Pathable will be providing our unique buttons and mobile phone service in conjunction with Crowdvine at the upcoming Future of Web Apps conference in London, UK.

This is a premiere event with many notable technology innovators. We hope very much to make it more exciting and accessible to everyone.

You can check out Pathable in action at the conference website: fowa.crowdvine.com

We deployed Pathable at Foo Camp June 22-23 and ever since I’ve been telling myself I should blog about the experience. As is often the case for me, it wasn’t until I woke up today quite literally dreaming about it that my impressions were sufficiently crystallized.

Foo Camp is an invitation only two day conference, mixing web 2.0 alpha geeks and other “Friends of O’Reilly”. I was reading Tim O’Reilly’s post on Foo Camp takeaways, in which he outlines some of their goals: trendspotting, testing ideas, meeting new people, having fun. I was surprised, however, he didn’t mention building community as a goal. At the final wrap up session, Tim said that one of his greatest joys is to connect people. Well, what happens when you take a bunch of people and weave them into a knot of colleagues, collaborators, and friends? You get a community. I am a connector myself (well, half connector, half maven, in the tipping point vernacular) who has both studied and struggled to build communities, and as I meandered from session to session, chatted with people about Pathable, and played werewolf, I could feel the hum of Foo Camp’s community building engine.

Speaking of connectors, it was Brady Forrest who orchestrated our invitation to Foo Camp, and suggested we might be interested in trying out Pathable (our event based social matching tool) at the event. He mentioned that everyone was expected to participate in discussions, and the degree to which people participated had a big impact on their likelihood of being invited back again. It reminded me of the Burning Man philosophy of “no spectators”, striving to remove the distinction between audience and show – which is lauded as a key to their success at building a thriving experimental community. I have had mixed experiences about the unconference model, because often I will find myself in lackluster sessions, too resonant of many past discussions. The unconference model works best when everyone is an active, expert participant, and at Foo Camp the presentations and discussions were energized, intelligent, and full of ideas, demos, and dense information that I had not seen or heard before.

As someone who is more comfortable as an active participant, rather than merely an observer, my favorite aspect of the experience was our deployment of Pathable. Pathable’s goal of helping people connect is well aligned with those of the event. About six weeks prior to Foo Camp we met Sara Winge, VP of communications at O’Reilly Media and the event organizer, who told us Pathable sounded like fun but could we coordinate with Tony Stubblebine’s social networking system, Crowdvine, and Rabble’s event scheduling system, to assure the attendees had a reasonably seamless experience with only one log in. In the next couple of weeks Peter and Tony collaborated (through a mad flurry of IM messages) to enable us to collect social data through Crowdvine’s profiling system, and feed the Pathable similarity and clustering information back as a web service. Foo Camp had its own badge system already, so we decided to make Pathable buttons and worked with O’Reilly’s designer Suzanne Wiviott to create their look and feel. Our friend and affiliate collaborator Jordan Schwartz (now at Microsoft) wanted to explore an SMS component, so we got together, spec’ed out a tagging based Pathable SMS service, and Peter and Jordan worked together to build a smartphone server that communicated with Pathable’s web service to enable lightweight, ad hoc interest based SMS groups. Tony and Rabble worked together to integrate the unconference event scheduling system.

In other words, there 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.

And succeed it did! At least 95% of the attendees completed their Pathable profiles in Crowdvine prior to the event. A similar percent of the attendees wore their Pathable buttons. People reported their matches seemed accurate, and were strongly motivated to track down and meet their opposites. They were not always clear on the meaning of the color clusters, but nonetheless found them a reason to engage in conversation. One woman, in fact, was quite upset with us when her cluster changed (indicating weak membership, shifting as new data came in) because she’d already made plans with fellow yellows. We provided people with the opportunity to update and reprint their buttons, which only a few people decided to do. We were disappointed the SMS service wasn’t more used, but the event was dense enough and small enough that there was little demand for mobile coordination. I consider it a good sign that even as I was packing up our button making system at the end of the event, three people asked me to print out their button so they could take it home with them. In sum, it was a great experience, gave us an excuse to talk to everyone, and we got a lot of great feedback from some very, very smart people.

Thanks a lot, O’Reilly crew, we had a lot of fun.

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!

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.

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