My friend, Noah Kagan, is putting on the second Community Next conference on Saturday July 14th in Palo Alto. The topic of this one is “Viral! From 0 to 10 million users.” Personally I think Noah is a punk for not doing one in Boston :), but if you are in the area you should definitely try to go. Great line up of speakers, and more importantly a BBQ afterwards. Go here to check out the details and register. If you end up going, make sure to give Noah a big hug for me….you’ll know who Noah is because he’ll have a burrito in his hand. [tags]Social Networking, Social...

There are user interaction designers, user interface designers, ui architects, user experience gurus, etc, etc. With communities there is a new breed of designer that is becoming extremely valuable; social interaction design. A lot of UI design in the past was focused around strict conversion. Monetary conversions, converting to a registered user, converting users to more page views, conversion from one step to another. But in a community or social network conversion to certain actions are important, there are many other factors at play. Social interaction design isn’t about strict conversion...

My company, ZoomInfo, has announced a major partnership with business social network XING. Due to my heavy involvement in the deal and future implementation, I am unable to write a post with any honest substantial opinion. So instead, I want to to turn it over to my readers… What would you like to see in a ZoomInfo + Xing integration to help business social networking improve? Intial Press Coverage: VentureBeat Press Release Mashable [tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Online Community, Xing, ZoomInfo, Brian Balfour[/tags]

Last night in the shower (yes, the shower…I do my best thinking there) the question came into mind, will an online community ever offer stock options to community members? It sounds ridiculous at first, but there are some interesting reasons for why it might happen, and at the same time be a very powerful community builder. 1. Companies offer stock options to employees, employees help build the company. Community contributers also help build the company, just in a different way. 2. The same economics of stock options apply. The early users would get bigger chunks of stock options than...