MeetingWave Brings Social Networking into the Real World
We’re all online these days, but have we forgotten how to interact in person? With unemployment topping six percent, business networking is more important than ever and some people (albeit probably not antisocial folks like me) might want to get to know their neighbors. MeetingWave, recently launched in beta, is part of a trend toward social networking sites designed to enable offline interaction.
The concept is simple, you sign on to the free website, create a profile and post an invite to meet new people. You decide who can attend and how much information you want to share in advance on the location, details and particulars of the meeting. Feeling shy about posting an invite? You can also browse existing invites and accept any that are of interest. When I browsed the site for meetings in the Bay Area, I found listings around topics including real estate, mom’s groups, and even romance.
A large percentage of users are traveling business people who want to meet like minded people in cities they’re visiting. This was actually the inspiration for the site. I spoke with John Boyd, MeetingWave, CEO and Founder who said he originally thought of the idea in 1999 when he was a patent attorney and frequently traveling.
“My only options,” Boyd said, “would be eating in the hotel room alone or eating in the dining room where I was also alone. I thought it would be useful to have a networking tool where I could meet people when I was on the road.”
MeetingWave offers new users guidance on how to structure their invites to generate interest and provides easy step by step instructions making the process simple. The site also provides practical safety tips that should be followed in any offline networking setting, such as meeting in public places and bringing a friend with you if appropriate.
In addition to the current FAQs, Boyd pointed out that there will soon be a “features” page dedicated to explaining how the site works and highlighting useful features people might miss, such as the ability to import contacts from Linked-In, GMail, Yahoo! Mail and other web mail services, forward invites of interest to friends for their review, use RSS to be notified of new invites of interest and more.
By the end of Q4 2008 the company plans to roll out a geolocation platform on either Blackberry or iPhone that would allow users to do things such as search for meetings on a particular topic within a certain distance, such as 10 miles, of their current location or be notified of invites of interest based on their location. Other features in the works include email notifications of new invites of interest and widget technology that would enable users to seamlessly integrate MeetingWave into existing social networks on sites such as Ning.
Asked about his feelings on the Beta program Boyd said, “We’re excited about moving forward.”
As well he should be. With possible applications ranging from end user social networking to closed systems for setting up meetings at places such as large conferences and tradeshows, MeetingWave has a lot of market potential.
Related posts
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under In Beta, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
