Noonhat :: Seattle Net Tuesday Notes

[Brian Glanz]

Below are my notes from one of five presentations at August's Seattle Net Tuesday. Notes from each presentation are a separate blog entry. Sessions were limited to five minutes, so I followed up with presenters as needed. -- Brian Glanz

Noonhat presentation by Creator Brian Dorsey

For all of human history, great conversations, meetings, and celebrations have happened over food. Your daily lunch is probably not often historic, but while wedged into our working lives, lunch done right is a small slice of greater humanity. It can be refreshing, even inspiring, if you step out of your routine.

Try Noonhat to take lunch to the next level. Noonhat matches you with people near enough to you who are available for lunch on a date you select. Except for your shared availability, matches are random. This is not a dating service; Noonhat is purely about tossing the social salad.

Brian Dorsey works full time as a software developer, but not on Noonhat! To Seattle Net Tuesday especially, Noonhat represents what one person is capable of in his or her spare time, using free, open source tools, and with a bit of help from the Seattle community. Dorsey spends $15 per month on hosting, and Noonhat has no other cost except his time. Noonhat is free to its users. Dorsey spent what he described as "50 software guy hours" on the project to-date.

Other than the awesome possibilities for building on free, existing tools and for starting something new in Seattle, Dorsey's other essential message was: be willing to do things before you're ready. The Noonhat home page was up and running before he had prepared automation for matching people to lunches. Even though he had to manually perform matches in the early going, he proved the concept and ultimately improved the process with a trial by fire approach.

Dorsey had a second great example of this lesson -- that is doing things when the time is right, if before you're ready. The day after we met at Seattle Net Tuesday, Noonhat was on King 5's TV News. In the previous few days, he and Noonhat had been voted from an Ignite Seattle into presenting at Gnomedex 2007. In less than a week, visits to the Noonhat site went from dozens per day, to more than 1,000 per day. Dorsey took advantage of the attention he gained at the internationally-acclaimed Gnomedex conference to launch Noonhat nationally -- not that he was ready for that, either!
As of Seattle Net Tuesday's meeting, Noonhat was actually working nationally and the first Noonhat lunches outside Seattle were happening, but when you visited the site, the user interface controls for choosing a location were centered and zoomed in on Seattle. To request a Noonhat lunch in New York City, for example, you needed to manually drag your view of the area in which you can have lunch over 3,000 miles of Google Map. Noonhat would be easier to use if you could enter a zip code first, and that's a feature Dorsey plans to offer, but it was more important to launch nationally when there was a lot of interest. It was less important to launch with a perfect service.

Dorsey also mentioned that in the span of its first few days of mainstream exposure, large companies had approached him regarding use of Noonhat internally by their employees. Not only King 5 News, but the Seattle Times and other media have given Noonhat increasing attention. If Noonhat had missed this opportunity to shine, who can say the spotlight would have come again?

During Seattle Net Tuesday, Dorsey called Noonhat "an anti-niche technology." It is a liberating way to meet new people. To paraphrase Dorsey's words: in a time of increasing professional specialization, narrowing and shrinking social networks, and pick-your-perspective media sources, this is social networking turned inside out and with no strings attached. If you'd hesitate to meet someone new alone, just bring a friend or two along to guarantee a good time, but with a twist.

In other words, give it a try. Pick your location, date, and cheers!

Brian Glanz