The Next Web Conference and Social Networking?
We are planning the Next Next Web Conference on June 1, 2007. I’m spending some time on the website and we are talking to speakers. One thing we are thinking about is adding a Social Network to the thenextweb.org website.
I complain a lot about Social networks on my blog but I also see a huge benefit for them. If we could add a social network to the site that would mean that people would be able to contact each other before the conference and set-up meetings and have a more meaningful conference.
But we don’t want to re-invent the wheel either. We could just start a new Next Web group on one of the existing networks or download People Aggregator and install that.
Then there is Ning.com and KickApps which we could consider.
What are your ideas? Just a Wiki? Are there any other Social Networking sites that I am missing?
In my eyes, it’s not so much the service you use but the application of the social network. What do you want to do with it? Or is it only voyeurism?
Rutger is tottaly right of course but one option might be Drupal. Their software just hit version 5 and it’s used by MTV, Nasa and myself ;) so i can vouch for it’s stability. For the type of network you are talking about you could install a minimal version with plugins for messaging and profiles turned on for instance.
Hello Tijs en Rutger! The reason we want a Scoial network is because we want to do something for the visitors of the conference BEFORE the actual cconference. This is usually an ignored space and I think we could do more with that. After Le Web 3 I got emails from 2 friends who were ate the conference but didn’t know I was there. We just missed each other. A simple social network to faciliate contacts would be nice.
Boris,
try a wiki, for start, i think it’s easier.
But if you set up a new social network for your event, you have to make the effort to scan the participants list and find those contacts. This extra work could be prevented if you could preseed from LinkedIn (or similar).
I don’t know if this is possible. I do know that social networks should provide open data to be of any real use.
Glad to hear that you’re considering KickApps – we’ll be adding private messaging and message boards to our platform in late February, which should facilitate some of the social networking goals you mention in this post. (Because KickApps is a hosted platform, these updates will appear on all new and existing KA-powered communities.)
Alper, very interesting idea re open data on social networks – do you think there would be privacy concerns?
Yes there could be, but currently most of the data in the social networks is already open because findability and browsability are a big thing. To ameliorate the privacy concerns you could make it very easy for your users to generate alternative personas and set visibility for each.
The future of everything is social and the current crop of social networks aren’t really helping us build that future.
Are you aware of any existing or developing standards for sharing social networking data, other than vCard-type snippets of personal metadata? I’m interested in creating permeable boundaries between social networks – this would allow people to get active in multiple niche, contextually-relevant communities without having to maintain multiple personas.
@Cris, I’m not aware of anything yet, but I’m very interested myself.
As far as I can tell you could use XFN, hCard and OpenID to build something. With the maturation of OpenID it looks like we’re getting very close.
Interesting discussion! Hope it leads to better social networking.