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).
What interests me is not how Noonhat.com fits into the web ecosystem but what this drive toward web-enabled pseudo-random social interaction is all about. Leaving aside the social drives making such social interaction desirable, there is the question of what participants in the projects are looking for. For me Noonhat’s random lunch was related to a fairly radical dream, in which individuals are unafraid — even eager — to have meaningful, perhaps difficult conversations with those from very different walks of life. But the reality is that it is very difficult to orchestrate and participate in any type of uncomfortable, meaningful conversation, let alone such conversations between strangers who may have very different beliefs and backgrounds. In the case of my lunch we talked about web development (our common profession) and how online networking could be used to find good coffee joints and hot dates.
The danger of the social randomization is that instead of fostering conversational courage and the ability to relate across barriers it encourages participants to develop slick lines of conversation, master the easy hour and focus only on the networking and identity constructions aspects of the experience. The question, then, is how can these models be adapted to encourage genuinely brave and substantial experiences and relationships, if they can really do so at all?
