New Feature: Group Page
My cousin Brad (who’s getting married *next* week!), wrote in to Jambo yesterday with a question:
“I noticed that when I log in on my software, that it says that there are 333 matches to my profile. Is the only way to contact these individuals to be within range and logged on at the same time?”
Great question! (And a good tie-in to the next feature I want to introduce.)
First off though, I want to clarify a couple of things:
1) We are selling to groups, not individuals.
2) We are selling to groups that are either physically nearby each other, or going to be nearby each other in the future.
These groups are things like conferences, university campuses, etc. But, if you are an individual, like Brad - no doubt it’s a bummer to download the software and then not see anyone on it. The Jambo dilemma: we were getting so many requests from individuals who wanted to download the software, that we decided put it up on the website anyway. Let me explain.
In thinking about our target markets (conferences, universities, hotspots) the people in those groups may not be nearby each other when they initially download the software. Maybe you just registered for a Jambo-enabled conference that begins in March ‘06. Or maybe you just got accepted to Washington University, but you don’t start until next fall. Or perhaps you’re a curious individual who just joined one of our “open” groups, like the Music Group. Enter the Group Page.
Each group on Jambo gets their own Group Page. Its available on the left-sidebar after you login (you’ll see “My Jambo Groups”) A group page is a collection of DiscoverMe links with some cool stats. Who are the people in this group that I’m most closely matched with? Do I have any shared friends with other members of this group? Who joined the group today? Things like that.
The Group page let’s you flag people that you want to be notified when they are around you. Let’s say Brad is headed to South-by-Southwest in Austin next March. Today, he could go to the SXSW Group Page and see who he’s been matched with - he could start to message with them online, via their DiscoverMe pages, or he could just flag people that he thinks are cool. Then, later on the way to, and at the event, he would be notified about some of these cool people that are around him. 5 months later, he might even be travelling through somewhere like Portland OR, and find other SXSW people in the airport! But he can always go back to that group page when there’s no one around him. So, what we’ve done is give Groups a “home base” via this Group Page, letting members find and message with each other, as well as flag people they want to meet in the real world.
The short answer to Brad’s question is that in the Jambo application, yes to see these other matches, they would need to be nearby you, but now, with the Jambo Group page, you can begin interacting with folks in your group, before they are around you.