Social, Built In: Activity Stream, Channels, Polls, and Stories Come to Highbar

Back in 2014, my team at Attendify launched the first social activity stream in an event app. A private social network that lived inside your event: photos, posts, likes, comments, the whole thing.

It was by far the most important feature we ever built.

To understand why, you have to remember what event apps looked like at the time. They were all the same: a grid of icons built to replace a printed guide. Agenda. Speakers. Map. Sponsors. Tap an icon, read a page, tap back. The app was a digital pamphlet, and everyone's pamphlet looked identical.

Adding a private social network broke that mold, and it helped us stand out in a big way. Suddenly an event app wasn't a reference document. It was a place where something was happening. Attendees posted. They commented. They saw each other.

It's 2026. The icon grid is still here.

You would think that in twelve years the category would have moved on. Some things have changed, sure. The design got cleaner. The features got deeper. But open most event apps today and the "icon grid" app is alive and well.

The pamphlet survived.

And here's the strange part: the opportunity to build something social, customizable, easy to use, and just plain different is bigger now than it was in 2014, not smaller. People arrive at events already fluent in feeds, stories, reactions, and channels. They expect to share. They expect to be part of something. If your event app is a grid of icons, you're missing out.

Every post is an intent signal

Think about what actually happens at an event. Thousands of people, in one place, at one time, all with something to say. A great session sparks a hallway conversation. A keynote lands a line worth quoting. Someone meets the exact person they came to meet. A sponsor demo actually blows people away.

Every one of those moments is a data point. An intent signal. A post, a like, a comment, a poll response, a story tells you what's resonating, who's engaged, and what's working.

The more ways we give attendees to engage, the more we can customize their experience and learn from it. In a grid-of-icons app, none of that exists. The moment happens and then it's gone, unrecorded and unmeasured, because the app was built to display an agenda, not to hold a conversation.

That's why I'm so excited about what we're launching today.

A suite of simple, self-managed social tools

These are built right into a fully featured Highbar event app. No bolt-ons, no separate product.

💬 Activity Stream

Photos, messages, likes, comments, and replies. A real feed that attendees actually want to open, not a static wall. This is the heart of the release: a living, scrolling record of the event as it happens, built by the people who are there.

📢 Channels

Spin up an unlimited number of channels to organize conversations however your event is structured. By track. By topic. By session. By sponsor. By interest group. Instead of one undifferentiated firehose, attendees get spaces that are relevant to them, and organizers get a way to keep the right conversations together.

📊 Social Polling

You and your attendees can post polls right on the stream. There's nothing like asking a question to drive the conversation. Take the temperature of a session, settle a debate, or just turn a passive audience into an active one, in the same place they're already scrolling.

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🎥 Stories

Ephemeral photo and video stories with custom expiration times. It's the format everyone already knows, brought into the event: quick, in the moment, here for the moment and gone when it's over. The energy of the event, captured by the people living it.

🛠️ Endless Tooling

Organizers stay in full control. Content moderation to keep the stream safe and on-brand. Analytics to turn all those signals into something you can actually read. And tools to post from your official event account, so you can seed content, prompt conversation, and get the flywheel spinning before attendees pick it up.

And now, the pricing

Here's where a typical event tech company tells you this is a premium add-on. We'll be upselling it for bags of cash 💰💰💰. All you need to do is fill out an extensive form on our website, and a salesperson will take two or three hours of your life on a series of discovery calls and scripted demos before quoting you for a feature you already know you want.

Or.

We could just include it. Like every other Highbar feature. Simple, predictable pricing, where you pay only when it works and drives real outcomes for your event.

Oh, and it's 100% DIY, so you can set up and launch your event app today. No sales gate, no waiting.

That seems like a better idea.

Welcome to the activity stream, again. This time, it's for everyone.

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