Noonhat: Changing the World Through Lunch
Noonhat is a simple Django web app that lets people find someone to have lunch with. It provides an opportunity to meet someone who has different opinions than you. To use it enter your email address, a date for having lunch, and you adjust the radius overlay on a Google Map to show how far you're willing to travel. The morning of your lunch you'll be sent a mail that introduces you to two other noonhatters; the rest is up to you.
Its creator, Brian Dorsey, spoke about it at both Ignite Seattle and Gnomedex. It really resonated with both crowds. The sign-ups after Ignite equalled the previous month. Noonhat was initially Seattle only, but the service is now available nationally.
A large part of Brian's talk is devoted to just how easy it was for him to make the app. Despite this being his first Django project, he was able to build Noonhat in about fifty hours. He used Wordpress for his blog and of course Google Maps to handle the geo aspect. He's spent $15 on hosting and $20 on a Noonhat t-shirt. It's really as simple as it could be and it works for just that reason.
tags: geo, web 2.0
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Comments: 4
This is a very cool idea. Every day when i wake up and see news like this, i realize that this world is advancing too fast. Internet made the world too small.
I'm waiting for AssHat.com
"[I] realize that this world is advancing too fast" says something, I think; the perils of facilitated lunch brokering might be few (though all these social networking services seem like they'd be very useful for scam artists, e.g., engineering "serendipitous" meetings with marks), there's value in some processes being slow and deliberative, that Internetifying them may harm.
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Ajeet Khurana [08.13.07 04:11 PM]
I think this is what social media is all about. What started as torrential bookmarking is evolving into "real" social media.
As an aside, my interaction with Venture Capitalists has shown that they love to get onto the latest flavor in technology. For that reason, if nothing else, we should see a flurry of activity in the NoonHat spin-off space. I do not mean clones, but variants.
Ok, let us start with a break fast hat, a dinner hat, a weekend hat...