[SyneRyder]

With conferences, a strategy that worked for me is to research the attendees beforehand. Some conferences let you tweet "I just bought my ticket to XYZ Conference!", and I would then search for that & add everyone who tweeted it to a Twitter list of attendees. Then you can read their tweets, check out their websites, and get a sense of those people before you ever meet them. You'll quickly discover who you find interesting & resonate with.

[If your conference is savvy enough to have an attendee profile page, definitely take the time to browse though them.]

Then, you can engage with those people over Twitter, via email etc. If you end up building a friendship, then before the conference has even begun, you might arrange meeting up in the hallway between keynote presentations - finally meet that person you've been talking to on Twitter!

Another thing that has worked for me is to always take the extracurricular conference activity. I've always gone skydiving or bungee jumping when the conference offered it, and that's been how I've made some of my awesome new friends. I'm not a thrill junkie or anything, but there's something about sharing an experience like that with people, you end up opening up to people as you share your collective fear / vulnerability & excitement.