I had a very interesting IM session on Skype this morning with Salim Ismail, I hope he was on the West Coast or else he was really burning the midnight oil! He told me all about their new site which is launching today called Confabb. In their own words

He let me play around a bit with it and I absolutely love the idea (and not only because he included my it@cork Web 2.0 Conference reviews on the site). For someone who wants one place to go to find out when, what and how good any conference around the world is, this is a must visit site.

I expect to spend a lot of 2007 attending conferences to get the message out about LouderVoice and this resource will be invaluable in my planning. In particular the reviews and other social networking tools give it far more value than a pure event site like Upcoming or Eventful.

The only disappointment on the site is that they are not using microformats to mark up the event and review data. One thing I love on Eventful/Upcoming is the ability to pull events into Outlook with a click.

Two very important aspects of the site which will aid its growth are the depth of the launch content and the presence of conferences of every sort, not just tech. They seem to have deftly avoided the chick-egg problem and have seeded the database with over 16000 events.

I think this may become a very important site for me and I’d love in the long term to see some integration or mash-ups of Confabb, Eventful and something like LinkedIn.

For those of you who don’t know Salim, he is co-founder of PubSub and gave a great speech at the conference in Cork in June. According to recent reports he has three or four start-up irons in the fire right now so it looks like Confabb is just the first to break cover.

UPDATE 1; The TechCruch guys have a great review of it.

Technorati tags: Confabb, Salim Ismail, Event, Conference, Social Networking