Jonathan Brinley wrote:
If my choices are (1) _optionally_ setting up an account with an organization I know and trust, or (2) being _required_ to create an account with a third party that I would rather have nothing to do with, I choose option 1.
I understand your concern. On the other hand, there have already been 50 people that you'll be attending the conference with that have chosen option #2 (ok, option #1 didn't exist yet, but still).
I don't know what other social networking tools (other than Facebook) might be planned for this conference but something that worked pretty well for the JA-SIG conference has been to publish a recommended tag (i.e. JASIGSpring2008) that should be used to take any photos taken on Flickr.
At a recent BarCamp I attended they made heavy use of Twitter with a specified hashtag so anyone could follow comments attendees were making about the during the conference. That Barcamp was somewhat unique in that at least for part of it there was a simulataneous BarCamp in South Africa on the same topic.
