EchoDitto

At first blush, it doesn’t seem like the world of enterprise software has much to do with the work we’re doing building and empowering online communities and movements. What could the world of massive databases running of 30 year old tape-based mainframes have to do with training tomorrows leaders in the fight for the environment? Surely the email servers that run the blackberries and stock tickers and acquisitions databases for the Fortune 500 companies are only similar to our online organizing campaigns in the features of their most basic technologies, with the way in which these application are made and function being like day and night, right?

I just came from having lunch with someone I’d never met. We made the plan through NoonHat (which, it turned out, we both found through the O’Reilly Radar blog). The service is prety straightforward: pick a date on which you’re free for lunch and specify a radius within which you can meet and the Noonhat servers will send you and your lunchmate an email the morning of through which you can work out the details. It’s quite a beauty in its simplicity, leaving communication between the parties up to email and with an interface that is a simple extension of Google Maps. Though it echoes local meetups like Lunch 2.0, after-work drink network, facebook lunch groups and web dating, it’s still a pretty unique idea (though my lunch partner had already been working on a similar one).