Jambo

One of the folks on the Jambo team, Alex, pointed the rest of us to a blog entry by [former] University of Maryland student Alexander Payne, They Stopped Calling It Rendezvous. Payne describes holding an online conversation with someone while sitting in a coffee shop. But he didn’t have her IM screen name. How did he do it? He liked the songs in her iTunes music library. So he changed the title of his own shared music library (it didn’t matter that it was empty) to send her a personal message. She got the message, and changed her own library name to respond. A long conversation ensued via iTunes.

In the end, though, not only would she not reveal her IM screen name for a more conventional chat, but when she left the coffee shop, she seemed to avoid any contact with him. Not exactly the result he was looking for, which he lamented in a subsequent blog post. In the first post, Payne said “She didn’t leave her table to talk to me in the coffee shop. I didn’t dare approach her, personal space and all that.” He couldn’t know for sure which of the computer-toting customers in the coffee shop he was talking to, but he had a good guess, which later turned out to be right. He missed out on an opportunity for a face-to-face connection.

Back at Jambo, we discussed how the Jambo application could have helped him, allowing him to chat with his anonymous correspondent without asking her to reveal any personal information like a screen name. But it still wouldn’t have done much to give him the courage to approach her. To make that face-to-face connection, we have to make the leap from the digital world to the physical world that surrounds us.

Not being an iTunes aficionado, I had to try the iTunes chat trick between two of my computers, and sure enough, it works, though it’s not necessarily easy to notice that someone is sending me a message, especially if there are many shared music libraries nearby. And a similar approach works with the tag line in Jambo, perhaps facilitating a chat room effect with everyone nearby. But it’s nice to know that I can send a chat message with Jambo that’s more likely to be noticed by the recipient.

Can Jambo do more to help you build the confidence to get face to face with someone? Please let us know.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2005 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Face-to-Face. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.