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.