Jambo

I am reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Blink. His first book is one of my favorite – The Tipping Point. Blink describes the decisions we make without thinking. In one of the chapters, Malcolm talks about speed dating and how its “the distillation of dating to a simple snap judgement. . . . Do I want to see this person again? And to answer that, we don’t need an entire evening. We really only need a few minutes.” While I have never done speed dating before, I’ve met people that I instantly knew I wanted to see again. There is something about the “chemistry” between two people that can really only be determined face-to-face.

Speed dating has become popular because on a given night someone could meet a dozen or so people and determine which one or two they want to see again. Because they already know that they are attracted to one another, their first “real dates” are more likely to be successful. Speed dating saves people from having to go on a dozen separate dates to find out that you are only attracted to one or two of them. It seems like a more efficient way of dating, but yet it still requires going to an event.

What if you didn’t have to go to a speed dating event to meet someone before your blind date? Imagine sipping a cup of coffee and finding out that there was someone you shared a lot in common with nearby. You could quickly meet for a few minutes, maybe longer if you prefered, and if you both wanted to, schedule a time to go on a date. This could be even more efficient than speed dating, because you don’t have to take time out of your schedule to go to a speed dating event. You can just go about your routine and meet those that happen to be nearby you. Maybe instead of going to a bar on Friday, you just hang out at cafe to meet your date for Saturday night.

I can count on the folks on the Jambo team to find interesting examples of networking in action. Mark pointed me to Virtual Community Boards, Missed Connections Not Missed, and Ambient Noise, a blog entry by Ben Brown.

In his blog, Ben writes about what he found when he ran iChat while sitting in on a keynote speech at the SXSW conference. Some 80 other iChat users were visible on the local network, and many of them had set a custom status message with messages like “Man, the interviewer’s a tool” and “17AB, 10th row, left side, 3rd seat from wall”.

Ben was writing a blog entry about the keynote, and he wanted to post a picture of the speaker with it. But he couldn’t get a good picture from where he was sitting. So he set his own iChat status to “anyone got a photo of cox I can post to austinist.com?” Seconds later, he had an offer of help from someone sitting closer to the front, and a few minutes later, the picture was posted for the world to see.

So what does this mean for face-to-face networking? While the two people didn’t have a physical meeting during this interchange, physical proximity was a crucial part of the interaction. Also, Ben said that the helpful photographer was someone he had met the night before. That face-to-face connection might have made his good samaritan more likely to respond to the request.

With Jambo, where could it have gone from there? Besides the brief tag line broadcasts, Jambo could have found the commonalities between the people in the room – including shared affinities, friends, and interests. They could learn much more relevant information than what someone puts in a chat status message. And the participants could do it anonymously if they want to, opening themselves up only when they encounter someone they want to meet.

Right now I’m helping to get a large conference set up to use Jambo in May. I’m excited about what we’ll be able to do there, and I’m hoping we’ll get a cross-section of users on a wide variety of computer platforms all using 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 guy always wears a name tag. Everywhere. He feels as though it changes the dynamic of interacting with people around him. “In the beginning, it all started out as an experiment. “What would happen if I wore a nametag all the time?”…

“What I did not predict, however, was that wearing a nametag would become my own effective tool for increasing friendliness; especially in an isolated society that so desperately needs to hear more of the word ‘hello.’”

This guy will love Jambo!