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We’re co-hosting a party with O’Reilly Radar. It’s going to be a great party designed specifically for tech people with social skills.

There’s going to be a hacker magic show, a giant tesla coil, live mobile video, an SMS based game where your phone is your game console, and a full bar ;)

If you’ve got some rad piece of technology you’d like to share email party@thingamajiggr.com and tell us about it.

We’re almost out of tickets so get yours now by visiting thingamajiggr.com or check out the thingamajiggr party blog.

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.