One frequent request we hear from our users is for a way to quickly scan for familiar faces at an event. Well, the Pathable Research Labs (i.e., Shelly Farnham) has been exploring how to use maps as a visual browsing metaphor for exploring large sets of faces.

This past weekend, Microsoft Research used Pathable for its annual Social Computing Symposium, and this provided us with a perfect data set to test run some of the visualizations we’ve been cooking up.

So, without further ado, here’s a sneak preview of some of the innovative ideas we’ve got brewing.

In this version, the most “semantically connected” people are in the middle (Liz Lawley, in the left-hand example). Clicking on an individual allows you to see why they are connected to others, with their tags in common showing up as spokes in a wheel.

We’d love your feedback on how to use visual tools such as this to help you better “grok” who is at a particular event.

It’s important to us that this be more than just eye candy. We’re looking for ways to leverage the unique properties of visualizations (e.g., glanceable representation of multi-dimensional relationships) to help our attendees get more out of conferences and meet the right people.

This version, along with some additional features (e.g., tag cloud and groups) will be available as part of our standard Pathable offering in the near future, so stay tuned!

A couple weeks back, we announced that we are serving the Meeting Professional International’s MeetDifferent conference, and explained why it’s such a big deal for us to serve meetings of meeting planners. Today, we wanted to let you know that we’re serving another great Meeting Professional International conference that’s a bit closer to our Seattle home, the Cascadia Educational Conference in Bend, Oregon.

If you’re a meeting planner or supplier in the Pacific Northwest, we highly recommend this conference as a way to improve your skills and meet others in the meetings industry. And take a glance and some of the people that are signing up for the conference by clicking the “Cascadia Commons” link on the right.

If you’re an event planner, staying on top of all the tools that the web offers to help you create community and encourage networking amongst your attendees can be a time consuming proposition. We want to help.

Today, we released Resources.Pathable.Com, a web site dedicated to helping event planners help their attendees get the most out of their events. You’ll find articles on social networking, case studies, how-to guides on key services, a constantly updating feed of interesting blog posts from around the web and more.

Come visit us: http://resources.pathable.com/

So here’s the question: if everyone can get all the information they need online with the proliferation of blogs, Wikipedia, online books, etc., why do they still go to conferences?

Based on our study results of BarCamp Seattle (only just now posted on resources.pathable.com), here’s my answer in seven words: professional friends and a feeling of community.

Cheesy, I know. You don’t tend to think friendships and sense of community really matter in a collegial, professional context, but you know what? They really do.

Here’s the longer story:

We created Pathable because, in our own experience, meeting people at conferences is hard. Sure, you can start up a lot of random conversations, but it’s hard to find those five people at the event who have the same passion you have, who can really geek out with you on some topic. I’m one of those crazy, hyper-social people who love conferences, and even I find it difficult walking into an event with a totally new crowd.

Still, where else can I go to find a whole group of people with the same passion for social technology as me, who can talk about it for hours and hours on end into the evening over wine? Where else can I go, see the bigger picture of my field, find out what’s hot or not in the industry, and be totally inspired when I come back home to my day-to-day job?

Nonetheless, being the social scientist that I am, I felt we needed to do a real study at an event to test some of our assumptions. How important is networking at events? What are people *really* looking for? What makes them want to come back year after year? And, can Pathable really help?

Last summer, we sponsored BarCamp Seattle by providing Pathable for free. The attendees were mostly people in the technology industry in Seattle. The BarCamp organizers were a very friendly group of folks and were amenable to our sending around questionnaires at the event and online afterwards. We asked a lot of questions assessing various features of the event (quality of session, quality of conversation) and then included some standardized measures (from social science literature) adapted to assess networking and sense of community.

The results surprised even me.

Of these variables, what was the #1 predictor of people intending to return the next year?

- The quality of their conversations.

What was the #1 predictor of people saying they would return year and year?

- Their sense of community.

That’s right! At a professional event where people were meeting to talk about technology, the top predictor for returning year after year was sense of community. We similarly found that our sense of community measure and our event attachment measure were very strongly correlated (r = .81).

We also found that Pathable helped: the more people used Pathable, the more “professional friends” they had at the event, and the higher their sense of community and event attachment. They felt the more they used our matchmaking feature, the more valuable Pathable was in helping them meet others. See Figures below.

What does this all mean?

Well, it indicates to me that people really do seek out “professional friendships” in their work life. These are people who share your passion for what you do, can really provide a lot of knowledge and support in helping you be effective at what you do, and will collaborate with you in what you do. These are people for whom sometimes you have to travel far and wide across the globe to find them at conferences — and to participate in that community feeling around what you do.

If you want to learn more, we’ve posted excerpts from the study report on our resources page: resources.pathable.com, including discussions of why networking really matters, the relationship between sense of community and event attachment, how generally to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies at your event.

Kevin Leneway of the the Seattle 2.0 blog stopped by our offices yesterday for a tour, and posted a nice profile of Pathable there: Start-Up Profile: Pathable.

It’s good to see that Kevin gets us: we’re not a technology-for-technology’s-sake type of company. In fact, Kevin quotes me as saying “Our goal is to get people out of their basement, away from the glow of their computer monitor, and out into the real world, meeting people,” and that’s exactly right.

The truth is, I hate the idea of my life’s work causing people to spend more time with computers. I want people to spend more time with people, and that’s exactly Pathable’s goal. Social networking shouldn’t be about “friending” someone you’ll never shake hands with, it should be about using on-line community tools to find people to interact with in the real world, then going out and meeting them!

Coming soon to Pathable 2.0: the off-button on your computer!

Meeting Professional International is hosting a webinar tomorrow, Thursday 1/16/09 at 1 pm CT where Jim Spellos and I will walk attendees through how to use MeetDifferent’s Pathable site to find people to network with, start conversations with them and build your personal schedule. Tune in:

http://www.mpiweb.org/cms/mpiweb/pec2009/peccommon.aspx?id=22630

There’s an interesting, and recurring conversation happening on the LinkedIn EventPeeps groups forum, the LinkedIn group for event professionals. The complaint is that the discussion area, which is meant for “networking” is being used for self-promotion (job seekers, job postings, services offered, etc.), which is perceived as spam. A cry has gone up to protect the group with suggestions ranging from moderation of messages to paid participation to specific “self-promotion” areas being offered.

While understandable, focusing the frustration at the spammers is a classic case of “blame the user”, an instinct software and service designers try to avoid. The interface and context will guide user’s behaviors, and in this case, there are elements of the experience that are encouraging people to exhibit this non-desirable behavior. For example:

• Context: It’s hosted on LinkedIn, which is a job-seeker / job-offering / deal-seeker marketplace. In that context, it’s not surprising people believe it’s appropriate to engage in those behaviors.
• Reputation and Social Bonds: The group has over 4,400 members, but only the most recent 5 messages show up on the front page and there’s no segmentation between them. It’s all one big, loud room. This means it’s difficult to form strong social bonds with the other attendees. Social bonds can produce a sense, among the user’s, that they are accountable to their peers, a strong influence on behavior
• Accountability: What’s the downside of spamming in this context? Very little, because your expectation of meeting or being rememberd by the individuals in the group, given there are thousands of them, and thousands of messages is low.
• Modeling: The MeCo group, a meeting professionals mailing list, has a strong moderation model and doesn’t suffer from this type of spam. It’s not just that the MeCo group’s moderator punishes people who misbehave, the MeCo moderator models good behavior by starting the types of conversations they want to see others having.

Interestingly, we don’t see this type of behavior at Pathable-hosted events. I think there are several reasons for this:

• Accountability: You’re going to an event where you’re going to meet your fellow attendees in person. Knowing someone is going to have the opportunity to tell you how they feel to your face is a strong incentive not to make them unhappy.
• Reputation and social bonds: We went to great lengths to create a sense of community, with a number of different ways of creating quick and tight social bonds with those you are similar to. Tag-based discussions, for example, is one attempt to fight the “big, loud room” problem.
• Context: The community’s so created are relevant to the industry, assocation or social group that is hosting the event, not to the service that is powering it. That means that the social norms that are relevant to the community as a whole more naturally translate to the on-line portion of the community we host.

Lest you think my goal in outlining the above is to promote Pathable, I should note that many of the pro-social determinants I describe apply equally well to our competitors. LinkedIn is a different problem, though. There are certainly features they could add to encourage the types of communication the members want, but as long as LinkedIn is the context, I’m skeptical how effective they will be.

They say that doctors make the most difficult patients and chefs the harshest critics. That’s why we’re particularly proud to announce the launch today of the Pathable community for the Meeting Professional International’s MeetDifferent conference in Atlanta, February 7 – 10, 2009.

A meeting of meeting planners by an organization of organizers: a tough audience for which we are honored to be chosen. We can think of no other community we’d rather help create.

I’ll also be speaking at the conference on How Web 2.0 Can Build a Community for Your Conference, where I’ll be covering how services like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Upcoming can be used to help build attendance, community and attendee satisfaction at conferences, so if you’re coming to the conference, be sure to pay a visit!

http://www.pathable.com/events/meetdifferent-2009

Not to brag or nothing, but we’ve always thought we were pretty good looking over here at Pathable. Still, nothing gets you in that new year cheer like a new set of duds, so we’re pleased to announce a complete redesign of the Pathable service.

OK, they may look similar to the untrained eye, but there are some dramatic differences in terms of easy of use, how quickly the pages load and how easy it is to adapt the look and feel to the unique requirements of individual conferences. The message experience, in particular is now, dare we say, yummy. Huge thanks to Nicole, David and Jessica at the Design Commission for their great work.

If you’ve been to a Pathable event, just visit it now to see the new style applied. If not check out this short, 2 minute demonstration video below to see all the ins and outs. Enjoy!

Want to embed this screencast in your blog? Copy and paste:

There’s been quite a bit of chatter in the meetings technology community over a ghoulish e-mail sent out by SpotMe this past week announcing the demise of their prime competitor, nTag. It read, in part:

According to United States Bankruptcy Court Records dated December 24th, 2008, nTag Interactive Corporation has filed a Voluntary Petition for Liquidation.

Former nTag employees say they were dismissed at noon on December 31st.
[...]
While it is unfortunate to see any company in our industry file for bankruptcy and people lose their jobs, Spotme is available to service the event communication and networking needs of former nTag customers.

While both Pathable and nTag sought to provide solutions in the same problem space, making it easier for conference attendees to make face-to-face connections at conferences and events, making us technically competitors, we’re sad to see them go. nTag was a cool product, and we’ve done enough prototyping and experimenting in the hardware space to recognize that the freedom of “owning the device” can create great opportunities.

At Pathable, we’ve focused on leveraging devices already in the hands of the attendees to create our on-site experiences: iPhones, Blackberries and lesser mobile phones. This has the advantage of both making us much less expensive and lowering the carrying burden of the attendee.

That said, there’s a host of features we’ve salivated over that simply aren’t practical or possible when someone else controls the hardware: beeping when someone you’re looking for is “in range”, exchanging contact info by tapping devices together, etc.

Still, we’re happy where we are. My guess is that had the iPhone or the modern Blackberry been available in 2002 when nTag was founded, they may have made a different platform choice. The cost efficiencies of leveraging hardware someone else has already paid for, plus physical comfort afforded by piggybacking on a device that already has a home on the attendee’s person are, we believe, overwhelming compared to the freedoms afforded by owning the platform.

The other side of the story, of course, is the economy. (But isn’t the other side of every story in the news these days?) Without knowing more about nTag’s ongoing business, it’s difficult to know whether this turn of events was inevitable, or whether they’re the first high-profile economic casualty in the event industry.

We predicted some time ago that the recession would actually be good for companies like ours, companies that were helping event producers reinforce and increase the value they were able to offer their attendees, and thus protect their attendance rates, and we’re happy to report that we have seen our own business pick up in the past few months. Still, news like this makes us clutch our coats tighter against winter’s winds.

To all the employees of nTag, best of wishes to you in this difficult time. Remember, highly qualified, competent people find their way in the worst of economies, so hopefully we will see you in your new roles soon.