http://www.ryze.org is the address. Some folks I know are already there (Will Kreth, Jon Lebkowsky, Arabella Clausen, there is a home city search in something called pivot according to Leb' and I intend to make that the next thing I try. They have tribes. One thing we lack on the Spring is a place for peoples bios and I'm thinking about setting up a conference called 'bio' where each topic would be a persons bio with their picture and inforamtion about their interests.

is this the latest in "networking"?

Yep, this is the latest, greatest, hottest, hippest, coolest game in town.

and it's free for now, 'ey?

Free for the most part, you have to pay for some of the advanced features.

Ryze is pretty good, but there is some controversy about their current privacy policy, so you might want to read that before joining. The owner, Adrian Scott, is supposedly revising it to make it more... community friendly.

What kinds of contacts have you made on ryze, arabella? Has it resulted in any business opportunities, etc.?

Ryze is an online business network. Here's what Scott Allen has to say about Ryze, at http://onlinebusinessnetworks.com Ryze Website: Ryze.com Summary: Ryze is a general-purpose business network community, offering highly customizable personal profile pages and both private messaging and public discussion areas. Ryze also emphasizes face-to-face networking, offering monthly get-togethers in many major cities. Membership: Over 50,000 members Membership is worldwide, with the majority of users in the United States, and a large user base in India. There are also large concentrations of users in Silicon Valley and New York City. Membership is extremely diverse, including entrepreneurs, high-tech executives, authors, freelancers, job seekers, sole practitioners, work-at-home parents, artists, musicians, actors, and many in outward-facing corporate roles, such as marketing, sales, and business development. The latter group may be less visible, as they tend not participate in the discussions as much, but they are there. Launched: October 2001 Founder/CEO: Adrian Scott. Adrian was previously a co-founder of Flycode, and has been an investor in several startups, including Napster and Giganet. He is a contributing author to six major Internet books, including World Wide Web Unleashed, Inside the WWW, CGI and HTML Unleashed, and Java Unleashed. Corporate Overview: Founder Adrian Scott is the most visible member of the Ryze team, and is the technology visionary as well as business leader. Chief Operating Officer Ken Scott, stays out of the limelight, but handles much of Ryze's business development and other special projects. Andrew Kraft . President of Executivity and co-founder of the Associatio of Internet Professionals (AIP) also serves as Ryze's VP of Events, helping coordinate and develop the Ryze business networking mixers worldwide. Ryze is known for running "lean and mean", and is one of only a handful of companies in the social networking space that is currently profitable. Ryze currently has three sources of income: Gold memberships, local networking mixers, and classified advertising. They are exploring other sources as well, but tend to move cautiously in making significant changes to the service. Adrian admits to having been approached by a number of investors, but remains tight-lipped about any details. So far has been turning them away, opting for maintaining control and bootstrapping Ryze's growth with proceeds from their profitable operations. Fees: Basic membership: Free Gold membership: $9.95/month, or $99.95/year Gold membership provides a number of enhancements, most notably: Search for users based on profile elements (see below for more) Pivots (quick hyperlinks to lists of people with the same profile attribute as you, i.e., common interest, same city, etc.) Ability to create and moderate one network (a group centered around a discussion forum) Discounts on Ryze mixers and other events Use of a simple web editor (allows non-technical users to easily format and add hyperlinks in their messages) Description: The Ryze community offers a variety of tools for both public and private contact. Major features include: User home pages � The home pages provide a moderately robust profile, including basic demographic and historical information, and fields for interests and industry where you can write whatever you want. You can also upload multiple photos, and Ryze uses them extensively throughout the site, adding to the very personal feel of the site. Users are also given an area of the home page to customize as they choose. It can be as simple as plain text or as complex as an entire web page, although it is still presented within the profile page. This gives users ample room to tell about their business and personal interests, or even link to multiple businesses and other projects. As a result, Ryze profiles, when done well, have more personal character than those found on other sites. Guestbooks � The home pages also contain a guestbook, allowing visitors to the page to leave a quick, publicly-visible message. They are best used to call attention to successes and other special events of the owner, i.e., "Happy Birthday", "Congratulations on...", etc. Unfortunately, in spite of Ryze's policies, they are often used by visitors for self-promotion, if not out-and-out spam. Friends list � Members can send a request to other members to be added as a friend. If the other person agrees, you are listed as each others' friends. The list of someone's confirmed friends is visible on their home page. Ryze also uses these records to show how you are connected to someone when you visit their page, by displaying the shortest connection paths at the top of that member's page. And the Ryze home page displays both the most recent friends of friends and a few randomly selected ones. Different people have different ideas of what constitutes a "friend". Some people only consider friends to be people they have met in person, or those they have had business dealings or personal relationships with. Others simply "collect friends", and you may get requests from people you've never met before to add them as a friend. Don't feel obligated to. If everyone started adding each other as friends whether they really know them or not, the value of someone being a "friend of a friend" becomes non-existent. Eventually, everybody would be directly connected to everybody else. And while that may sound nice in theory, it really defeats the purpose of building networks, which is not just to increase the number of people in your network, but to increase the number of relevant, high-credibility, and strong relationships you have. No reasonable person will be offended if you turn down a �friend� request from someone you barely know. We recommend keeping some text handy in your master �Emails to Recycle� file saying, �I have a strict policy only to link to people that I know well, and ideally have worked alongside in some capacity. I�m more than happy to get to know you in some other context.� You can just cut and paste from that file when you get requests like this. Contact manager � The contact manager acts as a central management point for interacting with your Ryze contacts. It also provides a means of bookmarking certain individuals for future review without requesting them to be your "friend". You can export your Ryze contacts for import into a spreadsheet or contact management software. You can also view a historical graph of the growth in your number of contacts and number of friends. Private messages � Private messages allow one to easily respond privately to people's postings or home pages. They also provide a layer of privacy by allowing private communication without exposing your e-mail address. You can also block users from contacting you and report spammers, harassment, or other inappropriate behavior. Networks � Gold members are each allowed to create one network. The networks are primarily a discussion board, but members "join" rather than "subscribe". Each network has a home page that the leader can customize as she chooses. The network leader can also send e-mails to all network members who have granted permission to do so (the default setting), and can moderate the messages and eject members. The forums, particularly the moderation tools, are primitive by comparison to more mature discussion forum applications that users may be accustomed to. However, they serve their purpose, and the interface is simple and uncluttered as a result. User search � Free users can only look up Ryze members by name, but Gold members can perform searches on any number of profile elements. This is a very powerful tool for proactive networking and is well worth the price of the Gold membership for this feature alone. The unstructured nature of the data, while offering users great flexibility and freedom of expression, also creates inconsistent and sometimes poor quality data. Because Ryze searches on simple string matches, synonyms, misspellings, and variant forms of words will not show up in a search, e.g. "cross-country skiing" does not match "x-country skiing". At some point, Ryze will want to implement a semantically-capable search engine to improve this. Classifieds � The Classifieds were started both in response to user demand and as an additional revenue stream for Ryze. They are the latest feature addition to Ryze. Basic ads can be entered for free. For a fee of $5.95 for 30 days (currently $5.95 as an introductory offer), your ad title will be displayed in bold print and will be rotated in for various placement throughout the Ryze site. Events � All users can enter events on Ryze. Each event is given a dedicated, highly customizable page and is listed in a public calendar. Upcoming local events are also listed in the weekly e-mails sent out tomost Ryze users. Users can publicly RSVP to events, allowing attendees to see who else is going and get to know each other in advance. This powerful combination of online and offline networking is one of Ryze's best features. Networking mixers � Ryze holds in-person networking mixers monthly in a growing list of cities across the U.S. and even around the world. They provide an opportunity for strengthening relationships, and are helpful in making new members feel welcome and comfortable with the group. They are also a secondary revenue source for Ryze. Notes: Ryze is very much like the old story of the blind men and the elephant�people tend to perceive all of Ryze to be like whatever they happen to grab onto first. Many people have said that it seems like a dating site, but then others say that it seems like it's all network marketers, and then others that it's all techies. Whatever the perception, that's just one limited view of what's going on. There is a heavy social flair to Ryze, owing largely to its extensive use of member photos, but don't be fooled�there's also a wealth of real business being created here. Ryze is clearly positioning itself as a business networking community (it's even embedded in their logo). Ryze is an open, friendly, and talkative community, and a great deal of the networking takes place publicly. The guestbooks seem to play a larger role than in other communities. And while there is a large number of networks, the limitation of one per Gold member keeps it reasonable, with (so far) not a great deal of duplication between groups. Because it is such an open and diverse community, Ryze has not yet attracted many executives, senior managers, and other senior individuals outside the technology industry, who tend to seek out more exclusive communities so as to avoid unwanted solicitation and other inbound communications. This is largely an issue of perception, though, not of functionality, for Ryze's privacy controls allow users to very effectively limit their accessibility. If you are a busy professional first getting involved in Ryze, you will want to consider your privacy and notification options immediately, or you will immediately receive an unexpectedly large number of e-mail notifications of "small talk" messages left in your guestbook. Recommendation: Ryze's advanced features offer power networkers a variety of tools for proactive networking, but its simple and highly intuitive user interface make it very accessible even to novices. Extremely busy individuals will want to review the privacy and notification features, as Ryze tends to generate a great deal of activity. Ryze is an excellent choice for individuals looking to increase their visibility and build credibility in a public context. The large number of active discussion groups and the high membership growth rate make it well-suited for this purpose. Be time-conscious, though�it can truly be addictive. It is also well-suited for those wishing to increase the diversity of their network, as it has perhaps the most geographically, demographically, and culturally diverse membership of any of the online business communities. Disclosures: Scott Allen is a Regional Event Chairperson for Ryze, moderates the Ryze Education and Best Practices Network, and teaches teleclasses for Ryze.

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