A week or so before the Maker Faire, I got an email invite to a social network that had been set up for Faire presenters and attendees. I took the link and set up my page on CrowdVine, a very cool service created by an ex-O’Reilly employee, Tony Stubblebine. Within a few hours, I watched an entire community popcorn into existence. It was quite inspiring. People got the evites, logged on, patched in their RSS feeds, their Flickr sets, their soc bookmarks, started friending each other, and leaving comments. It really was a great asset to be able to see who was going to be there, talk to each other about meeting up, learning about new people, etc. I identified a number of people at the Faire based on their photos on the site and read background on others.
CrowdVine is really easy to set up and use, so much so, I’m tempted to set up a Street Tech socnet, though I don’t know if there’s a real need for it. If you *are* in need of a such a network, especially for an event, you likely won’t find a quicker way to spark up a flash crowd than this with this site.