Confabb Introduces Social Networking

The development team at Confabb has been busy these past few months. Today, we are announcing a whole bunch of new features. Here is an excerpt from a press release:

New Logged-in Homepage
Log in and check out 'your new homepage.' Above "your conferences" is the new "your network," a bird's-eye view of bulleting board messages from within your network (more on that below), your online Confabb connections and any messages sent to you by those within the Confabb community. Click on "My Account" to see the full range of search and connection possibilities. Post your own messages for everyone to see on "your bulletin board," which will be broadcast globally or have a one-on-one discussion with other Confabb members. You can also see what others are talking about and invite new people, either from within or outside of Confabb, to join your network.

Buddy Lists/or My Connections

Just as you keep a list of people with whom you correspond daily, the "My Connections" tab is your gateway to the personal contacts you've made within the Confabb community - people with whom you've connected before and want to stay in touch going forward. This is your personal network; friends, colleagues and other contacts whose whereabouts and doings you want to follow as they prepare for the event. Attendees can view the list of other conference participants, check out their profiles, and invite them into their personal network.

Bulletin Boards

Confabb gives all of its community members their own personal blog, or bulletin board with which they can share their thoughts, opinions on the issues and experiences. This is the community member's space; it's intensely individual, consisting of the member's content and comments from their readers. People can also read the musings of others within their network by clicking on the "Bulleting Board Posts" within "My Network" tab, which shows what others within their network are saying too. Each board - the individual blog and the personal network bulletin board" are completely searchable by the major search engines. You will build traffic from within the community as well as anyone from around the globe with an interest in what you have to say!

Personal Messaging

This is the Confabb community's private email service. We respect everyone's right to privacy so messaging within the community is handled by us; simply use the "contact" link to jot a note to the person of your choice and we'll send the message to the email they've registered within our system. Responses are handled by us as well so your information is never revealed unless you choose to do that outside of the community.

I'm very pleased to see how Confabb has grown over the past few months. It validates my decision to take a back seat in December to try and earn some money (everybody's gotta pay the bills) while the business development guys and the developers worked on the next phase of Confabb. I'm confident the team we have in place can continue to execute and grow Confabb in new ways.

We're up to over 22,000 conferences and adding them at nearly 4000 per month. I still need to write about how we made the decision to go with manual data entry of conferences rather than automated web scraping. It was a hotly-debated issue but I feel we made the right decision. Granted, if we had the resources of someone like Yahoo, Google or Microsoft we'd probably have made a different decision.

April is Autism Awareness Month

If you watch any daytime TV or caught Nightline the other night you'll know that April is Autism Awareness Month. Recently there has been a big activism push towards edcuating the public about autism and creating a larger awareness about what autism is and isn't.

When I met my wife a few years ago she mentioned to me that she had a nephew who is autistic. I didn't know what to expect. Over time, as we visited her brother's family for the holidays and family events I learned more and more about little Michael and his struggle in this confusing world. I watched him grow into the amazing little boy he is. He is now the star of an Autism Speaks video that uses the music of John Ondrasik of the band Five for Fighting. Every time this video is watched, a donation is made to the Autism Speaks charity. This is made possible via Revver's revenue-sharing approach that give up to 68% of the video's ad revenue to charity.

If you care about activism and educating the world about autism, please go watch this video now. If you're really moved please consider donating money. Thousands of children like Michael are counting on it.

Ten Years of Blogging and an Announcement

Congrats to Dave Winer on ten long years of blogging. I've long given him credit for inspiring me to start writing CamWorld way back in the heady days of 1997.

Sometimes I wish we could go back 10 years and push a big [red] "reset" button [that doesn't do anything]. I know there are things I would have done differently. Dave and I have had our spats over the years and have often not seen eye to eye. Usually we simply agree to disagree and go on with the love/hate relationship that has grown into a business partnership, among other things. Dave was one of the first investors in my most recent startup, Confabb. I was very happy that he saw the value in what we are trying to do because I've always respected his ideas, his leadership and his way of thinking.

These days I'm busy with my blog and online community consulting; almost too busy. I'm looking around for a full-time job in New York that can offer me decent benefits and a respectable salary. My reasons for this are many. The first is that I'm really tired of consulting and need a more stable income. My startup doesn't provide it nor can I afford the health benefits through organizations like Freelancers Union. The second reason is that the CamWorld clan will soon number three. That's right; my wife and I are having a little baby girl somewhere on or around October 1. This is somewhat bittersweet since we tried last year and lost the baby at 16 weeks. All signs and test results this time point to a very healthy baby so we're getting excited. We're keeping our fingers crossed. And our toes.

CamWorld will turn 10 years old on June 11, 1997. Maybe by then I will have my new site design done (it's been sitting inside of a Photoshop file since about Feb 2006).