SWIFT

The web 2.0 gurus at The Otter Group have been working on what promises to be an interesting application for integrating media, blogs, and social networking into conferencing experiences called SWIFT. There are countless platforms and methods people are using to take care of these functions now, and there's a lot of reinventing of the wheel. Nothing seems to do everything, and for every conference users and presenters are expected to learn a new wiki platform, social networking platform, etc, etc.

One appealing aspect of SWIFT is that it integrates with and piggy-back's on existing and established platforms. For example, you can simply link your facebook account to the conference page, and you can do your social networking using an existing account and a tool that everyone's already familiar with.

If you check out the site, SWIFT is publicized mostly as a podcasting management system. However, they're building more into it all the time, and it seems that podcasting features are only one part of the greater offering. Otter Group CEO Kathleen Gilroy has kindly been providing me with updates leading up to the release.

Even the best web 2.0 applications I've seen integrated in conferences are consistently underused because of the learning curve involved in mastering a new toy. Hopefully SWIFT has found their way around this challenge by marrying with familiar applications.

What are the other ways are there to deal with the problem of underused shared spaces at conferences? I'm always the sap that spends hours contributing to a wiki that only 5% of attendees ever look at.