Kick-ass roof deck? Check. Blazing Valley sun? Check. Add 1100 attendees from the tech startup world ranging from entrepreneurs, bloggers, vloggers, venture capitalists, strong mojitos and a couple of rappers (MC Hammer and Chamillionaire), and you have a must-attend Silicon Valley event.

Thingfo’s partner Mobissimo sponsored a table to demo our new MobiFriends social travel community. Next door to us was Chris McGill of Mixx and formerly Y News. Great catching up with Chris, Mixx is coming out with a lot of cool features. Me, Kate, Adam, and Szymon demo’d MobiFriends to a parade of interesting people.

After attending two years now, and also going to a lot of smaller meetups and the big conferences while working on Thingfo, I have to say that the TC August Capital event is one of the best networking events of the year.

More of my pics on flickr, and more from Michael Arrington here and Brian Solis here.

Solis sums it up, Tech Crunch August capital

“is to the Palo Alto Web 2 community what the running of the bulls is to Pamplona”.

You just have to be there, because of the atmosphere, the quality of the people and thus, the quality of the interactions. Compared to a lot of the smaller mixers and tech meetups, which can be more like a regular bar scene where you can’t talk and there are a lot of people just out to party, or the big conferences where there are several thousand people running between panel sessions, the Tech Crunch event is far better for good networking, conversations, and fun.

Why? First of all, if you’ve managed to get here you’re either a serious player in the industry or seriously trying to get there. People I had a chance to talk with were consistently focused, intelligent and knowledgable. But with those mojitos, beer, wine, and great music everyone was having a blast.

As always, it’s great catching up with friends from Yahoo, from both the “former” and the “current” columns: Sarah Ross, CMO for TechCrunch. Chris Mcgill, CEO and founder of Mixx. Jenn Dulski, CEO and co-founder of centerd. Jeff Weiner, exec-in-residence at Accel and Greylock, who presented a $7,500 check to malaria for none, where he’s on the board. David Beach (still at Yahoo) and also working on 12seconds.tv. Gil Ben-Artzy of Yahoo Corp Dev., the 2nd person to correctly name the old woman on Adam’s t-shirt (Golda Meir). Jen Cooper and Jim Squires now of mixercast.

But as I said earlier, the great thing about the TC events is meeting new people who are at the top of their game. I talked with quite a few interesting people, and it seemed that most really got what I was trying to do with Thingfo.

Monday Morning Blogger thinks it’s better to come and promote yourself with free beer than getting a sponsor table. I met Dominik and I think he is a great networker and self-promoter. But that may be more about Dominik than an average joe trying to pull off that stunt. If you do it wrong you’d come across as a joke, which he didn’t. However, having the laptop and being able to demo allows you to show people exactly what you’ve built. That’s even better than giving away free beer. Ok, fine. Almost as good. But you get my point — if you can demo, demo. (Which means, start building an iphone app for your startup.)

It was a great event, thanks to everyone we met and special thanks to TechCrunch, August Capital and Mobissimo.

(Cross-posted at mikegrishaver.com)

Thingfo and Mobissimo just launched MobiFriends, described as an online travel “collaborative community” by Mashable, and as a “travel social network” by TechCrunch.

I think MobiFriends can also be described as a “social travel application. ” How so? MobiFriends is an app that helps people do some key things, all in the context of Mobissimo’s industry-leading travel search engine:

1. Create a MobiFriends profile (using data imported from other networks, and linking off-site to their other sites)
2. Connect to fellow travelers
3. Share trip plans
4. Share favorite hotels, restaurants, cafes, museums, activities, etc.
5. Broadcast their activity from MobiFriends to Twitter (with more broadcast options coming soon)

Here are screenshots of the app, showing off some of what I describe above:

In addition to social networking features like creating a profile and connecting to other like-minded users, MobiFriends connects people based on where they live, or where they’re traveling. In addition, MobiFriends connects travelers based on shared tastes and recommendations for hotels, cafes, and activities.

MobiFriends is embedded in the Mobissimo site, and powering the app is Thingfo. So, rather than describing Thingfo as a white-label social networking provider, I prefer to describe Thingfo as a social application provider. Thingfo was designed so that we can provide contextually relevant social applications across a wide range of vertical markets.

Why social apps? To answer that question, let’s take a step back and look at the history of social networks. The first generation of mainstream social networks, personified by Friendster and MySpace, are widely described as pure “social networking” apps. However, they have some key utility for users. As Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison point out in their history of social networks piece:

Friendster was designed to help friends-of-friends meet, based on the assumption that friends-of-friends would make better romantic partners than would strangers (J. Abrams, personal communication, March 27, 2003). Friendster gained traction among three groups of early adopters who shaped the site—bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man arts festival, and gay men (boyd, 2004)—and grew to 300,000 users through word of mouth before traditional press coverage began in May 2003 (O’Shea, 2003).

MySpace was used by teens for self-expression, finding and following musicians, and of course, dating.

Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former Friendster users. The bands-and-fans dynamic was mutually beneficial: Bands wanted to be able to contact fans, while fans desired attention from their favorite bands and used Friend connections to signal identity and affiliation. Futhermore, MySpace differentiated itself by regularly adding features based on user demand

Naturally, with the rise of MySpace and other new “social networking” sites lots of people with existing websites realized that they could offer these features to their user base. So, white label providers of social software offer social-networking-in-a-box to snap onto an existing site. In fact, at Yahoo!, I put together a team inside the Media Group to build our own internal system that would add social networking features to Media (and any other) Yahoo! properties. The system we built went on to power lots of internal Yahoo! sites.

Now, there are times when you’re running a site and you want something more specialized than a social network and social networking features (blogging, comments, video uploads, etc.) attached to your domain. When a social network without a purpose crops up, “yet another social network” is the usual complaint, followed by “what is the value-add for the site’s users? ” If you can’t answer these questions, it’s tough to succeed. Most people are already a member of 1 or more major social networks and you have to convince them to join another one for your site.

One of the ideas behind Thingfo was that in the current market, sites need to offer some utility beyond basic connections as part of a “social” offering. In fact, for most successful sites, their utility is already built in. Mobissimo provides great travel search and deals for international travelers. Therefore, it’s natural for Thingfo to create a social travel application that helps people share their trips, deals and favorite spots in cities around the world. And since the Thingfo platform is set up to connect users to their profiles on other social networks — with data importing as well as exporting — members of MobiFriends can focus on their trips and their favorites, and link to their other profiles and sites where they’ve already invested time and energy to create a rich personal profile.

Now, going back to the larger market for social applications, there are some relevant posts on GigaOm that caught my interest. First, Carleen Hawn points to a blog post by VC Fred Wilson where Wilson talks about what he called the “market verticalization” of personal publishing.

“the personal publishing market evolved from cumbersome web sites to online diaries called blogs to social networks and more recently to microblogs.” Wilson refers to this evolution as a “verticalization.”

In a related post, Om Malik talks about further verticalization of the market.

The way I see it, the market has shifted its focus onto niche social networks, such as those dedicated to sports, music, automobiles and pets. You know, sites like Dogster! They have focused, engaged communities, which means they can attract a higher amount of advertising dollars. (Liz came up with a taxonomy of social networks back in February 2007 that offers up an easy way to understand the nuances of the social networking landscape.)

Not only do they have a purpose, but they don’t depend on hit-or-miss behavioral targeting-based ad systems that many hope will one day turn social networks into a gold mine. After all, if you sell dog food, then everyone on Dogster is a potential customer.

That’s where Thingfo comes in. We are here to help “niche” or specialized sites offer new social apps that supplement their core feature set and to extend the reach of those apps across social networks. We plan to launch other social apps for many verticals in the coming months, and we’ll keep connecting our apps to more networks and open API’s as we do it — as well as adding new features to the platform. Have some thoughts on the social web and social apps? Please share with a comment.

Update: and if you’ve made it this far, add me as a friend on MobiFriends!

Today, I’m happy to announce the MobiFriends travel community. Built in partnership with Mobissimo, MobiFriends is a social application that creates a next-generation online travel community for Mobissimo users.

Mobissimo visitors can share travel plans and deals, discover fellow travelers, trade tips on favorite hotels, restaurants, bars, museums and activities – all in the context of their travel search. Further, MobiFriends connects users to their existing social networks and lets them broadcast (optionally) their travel plans and deals back to relevant publishing networks like Twitter.

As Calley Nye points out on TechCrunch:

When traveling to a new city, what do you usually do first to find cool places to go to? Usually, you ask your friends. … Users can access MobiFriends from the widget on their personal dashboard, or on the search results page. The widget shows users their friends’ upcoming travel plans, recently reviewed locations, and their friends’ suggestions for favorite hotels, restaurants and activities in the location. Users are also able to share cheap fares, travel plans and favorite places with their friends … Mobissimo has several competitors in the travel search space, like Kayak and Uptake. While both sites offer reviews for locations, they lack the personal social network feature of MobiFriends. Reviews are extremely helpful, but they don’t compare to friends’ opinions …

The entire application is embedded on the Mobissimo site via widgets, and tightly integrated with the Mobissimo search engine to display relevant users (people on the same trip) and content (favorite hotels, restaurants, museums, cafes) on search results pages.

How does it work? The Thingfo platform makes it easy to build social applications for vertical markets - in Mobissimo’s case the application is specialized for the travel vertical. Where most social networking platforms create communities based on an affiliation with a partner site (I’m a member of this community!), Thingfo is an application-building platform that focuses the user activity on key activities defined by the partner site. The result is a more contextually relevant experience for site users and our partners.

Kristen from Mashable points out how this is new for online travel

What’s interesting about this is that there are a handful of sites that already have such community features for their travel planning and management services, but there aren’t many that have leveraged a seemingly unrelated (to travel, that is) network for the provision of a community.

In doing so with Thingfo in particular, Mobissimo layers in a redistribution factor that has yet to permeate the online travel industry and extends the networking potential of overlapping travel itineraries beyond those users that are within the MobiFriends network. By tapping into a user’s extended network, MobiFriends is also able to provide destination recommendations from existing trusted contacts, for suggesting things like restaurants or activities, based on your travel plans.

This is an exciting application, and I want to thank the Mobissimo team for their collaboration. We look forward to launching more social features as we get feedback from the community.

PS — Brian Solis put together a great gallery of screenshots from the app.  Check it out on Flickr, then join MobiFriends!

I had a great time talking with Ian Kennedy of Yahoo! and MyBlogLog about we’re using their API to accelerate community building. Ian and the team at MBL are pushing the envelope on open-ness with their API strategy. (Also, they have some cool new MBL stickers — they say “You are what you feed” and they’re bright green.) Annnyway, their API let’s you get a ton of info on your visitors and community members, if you have their “recent visitor” widget installed . What we discuss is how we use that data to make it easier for MBL visitors to jump-start community building, by recognizing users people and giving them access to their content, wherever it was created. Here’s the interview:

Think about it — what percentage of your visitors are already a member of an online community, or have a profile on another site? The key is being able to tap into those other networks and activate those users on *your* site.  Got a question, idea or comment about this type of API integration? Please chime in!

Today, we are introducing our thingfo platform. By introducing, I mean blogging about it and launching a new site at http://www.thingfo.com, while moving the Thingfo community app to http://things.thingfo.com, where it lives on and will get more attention in the future.

What is the Thingfo platform? It’s a widget and API system that enables successful websites to activate users, embed activity and community on their sites in their own look and feel, and let’s the site visitors publish content to the next generation of social networks. The result: an integrated community, contributing content and broadcasting across networks.A key facet of our platform is that it encourages visitors to contribute based on their experiences with our partner site’s content– in the real world and on the partner’s site. The Thingfo platform is also designed to help our partners leverage the new social networks but maintain control over their brand and user experience, with minimal development time and effort. You’ll be able to see it in action soon on our first partner sites.

Today, with the growth of social networks and increasingly open API’s across dozens of sites, a focused website or application doesn’t necessarily need to “build” a community.  What they need to do, is find the community they already have, and help that community connect, create, and share content.

If you’re thinking about how the new generation of social networks could activate your community, contact us.  And if you’re not thinking about this, but you think you should be, contact us.

Good times. — we’ve just launched an integration with Pownce. Why? Besides the great name? “Pownce”. Just sounds good. Beautiful design. Lively community. Works great. So now, if you want to talk about a particular ‘thing’ on Thingfo, you can send an update to your Pownce account, and keep your friends over there in the loop. We also added a little targeted search for Pownces and Twitters on our thing pages. Go to a thing, and you can check for the latest updates, start a topical conversation, or find people with similar interests.

Check it out, have fun. But don’t Pownce too hard.

If you’ve come to the site and happen to be a MyBlogLog user, you’ll notice that we just integrated the MyBlogLog API into the service. What this means is that we can recognize public MyBlogLog users and if that’s you, it’s even easier to join. But that’s just the first benefit of our ability to tap into this really great pool of data.

We can also recognize MyBlogLog recent readers, and with the API, those readers now get a “reader profile” on our site, with your profile info from your MyBlogLog account, even your contact list. Here’s where it gets even more fun. If a MyBlogLog reader profile has feeds for Flickr, Yelp, Upcoming, or Last.fm, you or members can view those feeds and import the feed items as “things”. It is a nice way to add more things, and to find out what you have in common with other users.

As an example, I was browsing profiles and came to Jeff Clavier’s reader profile. I click on “import photos” for the Flickr feed, and see that he took a picture of a Search Sig meetup I attended. Although we haven’t met, he’s connected to a few of my contacts, and I just found something we have in common. Cool! I can add him to my contacts on MyBlogLog, and maybe we’ll connect on Thingfo.

Note that not all the MyBlogLog profiles have feeds attached, and we are working to connect the data from their API to our service more deeply.  Despite this lack of perfection, the new open-ness coming to social networks is really exciting.  It’s going to make it easier to connect and share data across sites, and this is just one small example of what we’ll be able to do. Check it out, and please let us know of any ideas or requests related to this new feature and the ability to look at content from relevant feeds.

We’ve also made a few other changes, all to make the service easier to use: for example, we simplified forms for adding comments and experiences to things.  Also, if you’ve activated Twitter integration, you can now control what you send to Twitter on a per-post basis.   These were both requests from our early users, and they definitely help the site… so thank you, enjoy the new MyBlogLog integration, and please keep the feedback coming!

Kristen Nicole of Mashable just wrote a great post on our new “update from Twitter” feature.

Kristen perceptively says: (my emphasis)

Thingfo had already planned on Twitter integration, such updates [to Thingfo] could be sent in from Twitter. Equally as important, it allows Thingfo to have mobile integration as well. As I previously noted, Thingfo has an interesting take on micro-blogging…

Now, go read the whole article! Many thanks to Mashable for the coverage, and props to Kristen who’s been doing extensive coverage of the social tools space. Looking at her posts, I think she sleeps less than the startups she covers.

We just released another way for you to update any Thing on Thingfo! As the title of the post says, you can now use Twitter to update any Thing, from your favorite web app, or from your cell phone or mobile device. There are tons of possibilities, now that you can update Things wherever you are.

Here’s just one example: Let’s say you’ve added your favorite neighborhood coffee shop as a Thing. Next time you’re there, you can send a text to @thingfo and update the coffee shop with an experience, a comment, or both… and connect with the community you’ve created live and in person.

Or, you’re a teacher. You want to interact with an auditorium full of students, and you want to archive the responses and share them with the room. You’d create a Thing on Thingfo, maybe it’s “Lecture 3: The Rise and Fall of Rome”. Your students can send their questions, comments, and experiences to your Lecture 3 page, whether they are sitting in the classroom in person, or watching a video broadcast on the web.

Here is a page with the details on how to update any Thing from Twitter. You’ll also notice a new module on the upper right corner of the Thing pages with info on how to update that specific Thing.  Please note: it will take about a minute for your update to go from Twitter to your Thing.

We’ll continue adding new ways to create and update info for your Things. Please let us know of any questions, comments, or issues you have with the new feature!

I also want to thank all the users for their suggestions and feedback to date. We’ve just released a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks, and are working on more. Quick summary: You can now find an “add thing” button on any page, in the top right of the nav bar. (Thanks toddsampson!). We’ve labeled the said/did toggle more clearly at the bottom of the Thing page (Thanks johnsampson!). We put more people and Things on the front-page, and show more of your network activity on your page (Thanks gregc!). We’ve changed our handling of form tokens to make sure you can easily add content. (Thanks hipsmart). We’re working on more of your suggestions and will release them as soon as possible.

Please, keep the suggestions and feedback coming, and enjoy the new ability to update Things from anywhere!

Hey there! I’m happy to announce that we just opened Thingfo up to the public, with a bunch of new features. What’s new? First of all, you can now associate your Thingfo and Twitter accounts, and send your Thingfo updates over to Twitter. Thingfo sends a formatted post into Twitter with a link back to whatever *thing* you’re talking about. This is a way to add context and create community about whatever it is you’re talking about. (Soon you’ll be able to create posts via Twitter and add data to specific things, with our “from Twitter” inbound parsing.)

You’ll also notice that you can set up notification preferences for when you receive emails (if people add to your things, or you add the same experience as someone else, which we call “serendipity”.) Also new is a feature dubbed, “With who?” When you add something new, we ask you “with who?”. Tell us and we’ll send an email to your friend to confirm, and if they confirm, we add their experience. It’s an easy way to get your friends in on the action.

Speaking of friends, I had coffee a couple days ago with Todd Sampson (profile) and Eric Marcoullier, MyBlogLog cofounders (and fonts of incredible internet-product-and-marketing-wisdom). They pushed me for a release time and date, which we decided would be today, Tuesday at 1pm. Happily, the site was up and ready last night, when Kristen from Mashable came and reviewed it. (Talk about being on top of your industry, she got the site before the launch time!)

Thingfo is a new site that lets you build small communities around things or events that are going on in your life. The premise of these things and events comes in the form of “updates” where you get 30 characters to say what’s going on. Think of it as extreme microblogging, where the result is a formatted type of Twitter that makes groups around updates instead of the other way around. At the most basic level, what Thingfo is doing is gathering up all sorts of data about you as a person, and making connections accordingly.

As she observed, Thingfo is all about helping people share info and make connections based on who they are and what they’re doing. I really like that Kristen referrred to using Thingfo as “extreme microblogging“.

Here’s some additional rationale for the “extreme microblogging”, where we prompt users to add very short experience tags for things: I love sites like Yelp where you can go and see incredibly rich and personal reviews of local businesses and restaurants. Many people, however, don’t have the time or inclination to write a review or a blog post, or even leave a lengthy comment. However, they may just tell you that they “ate there”, got the car fixed at”, or “voted for” a certain politician. This information is useful between friends, and between a larger community of people. Using Thingfo, you can add to the pool of knowledge around well, anything, and share what you’re doing, or what you observed. Sharing connects you to others, and when lots of people focus on the same thing, the resulting mass of tiny bits of info can add up to something very powerful.

Thanks go out everyone who’s tested the site, provided awesome feedback, and for the new people trying it out. Enjoy!