All yesterday and this morning I’ve been seeing tweets about SWIFT, so I finally googled it to see what it was about. The service promises to help organize conferences in some new 2.0 way, but it looks to be about as preposterous a social network as WalMart’s aborted 2006 attempt at copying MySpace.

There are some real lessons here, however, about how to court the early adopters that are essential to making an application that depends on user activity successful:

• The license matters. Nobody wants to invest the effort it takes to get the ball rolling just so somebody else can profit from it. Wikipedia’s GFDL was essential, SWIFT’s license policy is already strangling the site. Don’t call them “users” if they’re really the ones building the site, and don’t expect them to work for free if you’re going to make a killing off of it.
• Details matter. Would you trust a company that can’t figure out permalinks in WordPress (the site’s blog is powered by WordPress) and has URLs like http://www.imswiftblog.com/?page_id=698 to be technically capable of protecting your privacy or solving the problems that matter to you? What does the placeholder text in the last page of this FAQ suggest?
• Your friends matter. A supposed social software app that associates with a conference that looks like astroturf has already lost my trust.
• If you find yourself explaining what value your service offers to the very people who you hope will be early adopters, you’ve already lost them.

Anybody want to bet me a drink that SWIFT won’t break the 1,000 users mark before the end of CIL? I doubt anybody using the CiL wiki would take me up on that.

I caught the following story on NPR’s All Things Considered (RealAudio stream) last night:

New York is known for its vibrant nightlife, yet in many bars and restaurants it’s illegal to dance. Now, a law professor is challenging the “Cabaret Laws,” claiming they violate a dancer’s right of free expression. The city says dancing by patrons is not a protected right — and can prove it. (link added)

This was a big surprise to me, and a bigger surprise to learn that it’s not just some blue law. It turns out that bar owners get fined thousands of dollars for allowing people to dance, or even “move rhythmically” to music. Surprisingly, there are only 316 places to legally dance in Manhattan.

Amusingly — in that circle of life sort of way — Lynne Taylor-Corbett, choreographer for Footloose, is among the challengers. She can’t believe the fact that the city she claims to have given birth to break dancing and hip hop should restrict dance only to bars that have a cabaret license. The license is the result of 1926 ordinance that decried jazz clubs for their “wild strangers” and “foolish natives,” according to the story.

The suit is being handled by NYU Law professor Paul Chevigny, an occasional tap dancer who gained standing on these matters by successfully challenging an earlier law that blocked many forms of live music in 1988. That doesn’t mean the city is rolling over on this. They’re fighting back, and all parties are looking to see how the courts answer the city’s motion to dismiss.

tags: blue laws, cabaret, cabaret license, dance, dancing, first ammendment, foolish natives, footloose, free expression, free speech, jazz clubs, law, legal challenge, license, lynne taylor-corbett, manhattan, new york, new york city, new york new york, newyork, ny ny, nyc, nyny, paul chevigny, rights, wild strangers