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
