It was Lawrence that said it best about strengthening weak ties, but I disagree with your presumption that connecting face to face is the paramount objective at a conference.

First and foremost, there are plenty of people that I want to hover around but not necessarily interact with. Scoble is a good example, I like to watch his comments but I don’t want to hang out with him… there are plenty of lesser known people that fall within the same category.

It is physically impossible to meet f2f with as many people as I can follow at an event. If I can meet up with 15 people in a day I’m pretty damn happy, but I can follow literally hundreds using the tools that we are fortunate to have at our disposal.

That’s why things like hastags, @eventtrack, qik, and friendfeed. This the kind of experience you should be expanding.

I’d also like to see some features that better engage the companies and people presenting. Right now it’s pretty rare for either to actually engage the audience and that’s a real weakness in the conference model.

There were a couple of things that I was responding to on twitter.

You’d started by calling us a weak forum. We’re not a forum, we’re a social network focused on helping attendees meet. You aren’t wrong for wanting a forum, that’s your right as an attendee, but that’s a request that’s better targeted at the conference organizer.

Dion had said that participation was low. There were 1900+ attendees, 10000+ connections, hundreds of blog posts and comments. I think because he was also looking for a backnetwork he was looking for heavy activity during the conference. But we’re focused on boosting the face-to-face value of the conference (otherwise, why did you fly out), so we end up with a usage curve that’s heaviest right before the conference starts.

In one sense you are attendees and it’s your right to form whatever expectations you want and then to be disappointed when those expectations are not met. I respect that and registered your desire for better backnetwork features.

However, you and Dion are both technology commentators and I think I’m well within my right to challenge your analysis. In this case, I want to get across the idea that personal connections are more important to the health of a conference than additional information streams.

Information streams are hard to differentiate and extremely price sensitive. I’ve worked for a technical publisher during a downturn and people happily turn from books to free online sources. Conferences are looking at the same dynamic because in this downturn free online information sources are granular enough to compete with sessions. The face-to-face isn’t as easily replaced.

If I was going to play devil’s advocate I’d say that more information sources amplify the presence of the conference, generate free marketing, and thus higher registration/sponsor revenue. But so does making your attendees day. In the end there’s room for both and we’re increasing extending CrowdVine into the day-to-day of the conference.

Even with the problems @eventtrack was able to keep up quite well thanks to the linking in to multiple other services – we certainly lost some of the conversation but I was quite impressed with what was captured.

http://eventtrack.info/?t_event=web20expo

Shouts: 881

Pics: 1052

Links: 126

Videos: 24

Prezzo: 29

Quite interesting to take a look through it all. As for Twitter we are back in business and watching things closely, Twitter folks seem to be quite willing to help work through the issues with us although timing was bad considering the issues they were having.

Craig

Thanks again, would look forward to catching up over a beer. Will send you dm.

(disclosure: i’m one of the conference co-chairs for Web 2.0 Expo)

thanks for the honest feedback. we are listening.

definitely some stuff we know we need to do better… we’re still working on the ‘Conference 2.0′ toolset to let the audience talk back. i think we are on the path to eating our own dogfood with new services like crowdvine, roamabout, twitter, meebo, etc. we may not have them all nailed just yet but they do seem to be getting used by attendees (and sometimes like you, they’re used to tell us we still suck at a few things, but that’s still good feedback too).

hopefully we got a few things right, and some of the tools work, and some of the sessions like Ro Choy / RockYou work out well & are interesting & educational. (overall, feedback on the track sessions has been mostly positive, if only luke-warm on some of the main stage talks… i’m listening to dan lyons / FSJ kill in the friday keynote right now, so maybe he’ll bring our B- up to a B+

in any case, we’ll keep listening to the feedback, and i know Tim is thinking a lot about how we can use the same web 2.0 tools & services we get all excited about to make our own conferences work for you guys & suck less. in my honest opinion, anything worth doing is probably worth screwing up a few times until we get it right.

thanks for coming out & would love to buy you a beer & catchup in meat space sometime soon.

• dave “500 hats” mcclure