One of the first questions people ask themselves when they’re getting ready to go to a conference is “who do I know that will be there?” The shame of it is that there are so many social networks out there that know who you know, but there isn’t an effective way to figure out which of those people are attending the same event you are.

That’s why we’re proud to introduce our expanded Twitter integration today.

If you’ve provided Pathable with your Twitter name when you register, we’ll automatically tell you which of your Twitter friends are attending. Just view your own profile.

This can help you find other interesting people to meet, as well. Visit the profile of someone you respect, and you’ll be able to see which of their Twitter friends are attending.

This is all built with the public Twitter API using publicly accessible data. Pathable never asks you for or stores your Twitter password.

The next question you’re likely to ask, after “who’s going” is “what are they talking about?” Pathable can help you there, as well. We now import all the tweets that include your event’s hash tag and display it on the front page. Plus, we offer a separate view that will show you all the tweets from anyone at the event, whether or not it contains the event hash tag.

Both of these views are updated in near real-time. You’ll see your tweets on the site in less than a minute, so this view can be used as a on-site Twitter projection feed.

This follows on other recent Twitter integration we’ve done, including adding a “Tweet Profile” link to each user’s profile that encourages them to let their friends know that they’re attending your event, creating your own personal viral marketing team.

Now we need to wrap this blog post up and tweet about it.

I lead a large team, by anyone’s standards: 60,000 strong. And in my off hours, no less.

I’m a backyard beekeeper, and my tiny two-hive apiary produces about 15 gallons (or roughly 200 lbs) of honey per year. I’ve been at it since the mid-90’s, so, always being something of a geek, one of the first web sites that I built was a “Beekeeper’s Home Page“. This was back when Yahoo! was a hand curated list found at http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo, meaning mine was the first collection of links related to beekeeping on the web.

When blogging began to come of age, of course, I had to try that, as well, so, in early 2004, I started chronicling my adventures at Hive Mind Honey and have been somewhat consistently journaling and ruminating there ever since.

Well, round about last year, I noticed something delightful: perhaps due my perseverance, perhaps due to the mystery and magic that is SEO, my little blog had climbed to the top of Google’s ratings: if you Google “bee blog” of “beekeeping blog“, Hive Mind Honey is the first hit. Win!

But then something occurred to me: Google knows I’m searching from Seattle, and it knows that the blog content is relevant to Seattle: maybe the reason I’m coming out on top when I search is that I’m searching from the same place I’m blogging.

How could I find out for sure if mine is really the highest rated beekeeping blog on Google? Social networks!

Last night, I twittered my question:

And I waited.

No answer. Hours passed. Still no answer on Twitter.

Fortunately, my Twitter account feeds into my Facebook status, and, lo and behold, the answers started to pour in there:

• Rob from Philadelphia: (1) Hive Mind Bee Blog (2) Andrew’s Bee Blog (3) {ritzy bee blog}
• Felicity from Maine: Maine: Hive Mind Bee Blog, Andrew’s Bee Blog …
• Bill from Salt Lake City: 1) Hive mind bee blog, 2) Andrew’s Bee Blog, 3) {ritzy bee blog}
• Burvee from New Haven: Same as Bill in SLC, Rob in Philly and Felicity in ME.
• Valerie from France: using Google in English, the first two are the same but the third is different: Hive Mind Bee Blog, Andrew’s Bee Blog, the purl bee
• Ted from Panama City, Panama: Hive Mind Bee Blog, Andrew’s Bee Blog, the purl bee – the purl bee

…and Ireland, Berlin, England and Korea, all the same results! Hive Mind, FTW!

What’s wonderful is that I know all these people from high school, college, Washington, DC, Microsoft, Burning Man, but I didn’t know where they had ended up, or that they were so well spread across the globe. And I didn’t know that they’d be happy to open a browser window and run a quick search for me on a moment’s notice.

So that, for me, is the power of the social network, and the power of the hive: personal connections connecting us to help each other out, if just for a moment…and then on with what we were doing.

Pathable profiles now include a Tweet Profile button for attendees. When they click the button, Pathable will author a tweet on their behalf that reads:

I’m attending (Your Event Name). My profile: http://tinyurl.com/abcdef #your_hash_tag

This is a great way to enlist your attendees as a viral marketing army, plus it’s a good way to help clearly establish your hash tag. We’ll be expanding Pathable’s use of Twitter and hash tags further over the coming months.

To set your event’s hash tag:

• Visit your event site (or sign in through http://my.pathable.com/)
• Click Manage this Event
• Click Event Basics
• Enter your event’s hash tag (including the “#”) and click Save

No idea what a “hash tag” is? Read about it in our Twitter for Event Planners guide.

Deep Throat said it best: Follow the Money.

With the change in economic climate, it’s become more important than ever for conference and event hosts to pay careful attention to their revenue streams, and we recognize that for many events, sponsorship dollars represent a huge piece of that. Nevertheless, when we built Pathable, we focused on the attendee-to-attendee networking experience first. Our thinking: if the attendees aren’t happy, you won’t have time to think about whether the sponsors are happy.

Once we felt we had delivered a solid attendee-to-attendee experience, it was time to turn our attention to creating great sponsor experiences, as well. Our challenge, though, was to create a sponsor experience that helped sponsors reach attendees without compromising the attendee experience. Ideally, it would enhance it.

With those goals and constraints in mind, we introduce our sponsor platform. With it, event sponsors get:

• Front-page placement for their logo and brand
• Full-page to show off their stuff, including a dynamc list of all their attendees at the show, to help attendees find someone to talk with easily
• Top-rank listing in searches for tags on the sponsor profiles
• All attendees from sponsoring organization get enhanced profile tiles

It’s a set of functionality that gives sponsors a higher profile within a topic area relevant to their business, and makes it easier for attendees to find sponsors offering services in which they are interested.

And what does this feature cost? Less than nothing. As part of the Pathable platform, the sponsorship tools belong to you, the event organizer, which means you can integrate this offering into your existing sponsorship packages, driving more and higher-tiered sponsor sales.

Now go sell!

Dark and gloomy weather is the best kind of weather for making progress on hard projects, so, as you can imagine, we’ve had a very productive winter up here in Seattle. We’ll be announcing a number of new features shortly (many already been quietly released to existing customers), but we wanted to wear our best outfit for the unveiling, so we’re starting off with our new look for our web site and blog. Take a look around, we hope you like what you see.

Big thanks (again!) to Design Commission for the face lift.

Here are two great tastes that taste horrible together:

• GroupTweet: GroupTweet offers “Group Tweeting”. If a member sends a direct message to a GroupTweet Twitter account, it is rebroadcast from the Twitter account so that everyone following it can see it. It’s a great way to instantly opt in to communication with a large set of people without having to follow each individually.
• Auto-Follow: If you’re like me, you get dozens of follows a day, sometimes. I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt and will auto-follow them back with services like SocialToo and Twollow. If their tweets are annoying or self-serving, I simply unfollow. I find it’s easier to unfollow the one bad apple than to manually vet and follow all the good folks who follow me.

Unfortunately, when combined with a third feature, auto-direct message on follow, these two features can be a train wreck. With auto-direct message on follow, one receives a direct message from someone when one follows them. Here’s what happens when these three features are combined:

• @PersonA follows @GroupTweet
• @GroupTweet auto-follows @PersonA back (or manually, for that matter)
• @PersonA’s auto-dm goes to @GroupTweet and then is shared with all @GroupTweet followers:

Thanks for following me! Be sure to check out my awesome podcast and purchase my hot line of fashion forward t-shirts at http://l0z3r.com/!

What’s so annoying about this is that @PersonA is thanking me for following them, when what started the whole thing was they followed me. And now the whole GroupTweet is polluted with their sales pitch.

The solution
SocialToo offers a simple service that will opt you out of auto-generated direct messages. Just sign up at http://www.socialtoo.com/ and check the box that says “Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other services?”

Ah, peace and quiet.

We mentioned earlier how excited we were to be serving both the Meeting Professional International’s MeetDifferent Conference and Cascadia Educational Conference. We’re also proud to welcome the Green Meeting Industry Council’s February annual conference to the Pathable fold.

Well, with all these professional meeting planners to impress, we decided to take out the stops and dress to impress, releasing a host of new features this past week to make sure attendees at these Pathable-powered conferences had a great experience.

To that end, we’re pleased to announce the release iPhone and Blackberry-specific versions of the Pathable web site (Note: this will work on most mobile phone browsers, we just made sure they looked fantastic on these highly common devices). If you visit pathable.com with your mobile phone, we’ll automatically serve you up the version appropriate for your phone, so no need to remember the URL when you’re walking down the hall, phone in hand.

In fact, to make it even easier for you, we’re included a special “On the Go” module on the Pathable home page that will let you send yourself a personalized login link via SMS, so you don’t have to hassle with typing URL’s or user names or passwords on your tiny keyboard.

The mobile versions of Pathable include quick access to your personal schedule, search tools for finding other attendees, and quick access to the profiles of the other attendees in your sessions, so if there’s someone you want to buttonhole, you can find read up on them before reaching out.

Now wait, I can already hear the cry from the mobile have-nots. What if you don’t have an iPhone or a Blackberry or some other browser-enabled mobile phone? What if you (gasp) prefer paper and pen to keypads and screens? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Pathable also produces a printer-ready PDF of your personalized schedule and contacts, so you can carry a dead tree version of Pathable in your pocket.

All existing Pathable communities have been automatically updated with these features, so whether you’re headed to one of the meetings we mentioned above or not, enjoy!

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/