Noonhat Lunch
August 28th, 2007
For all of human history, great conversations, meetings, and celebrations have happened over food & drink. 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, but only if you use lunch to 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.
It is a liberating way to meet new people. 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.
For people like us who have been transplanted to a new city and haven’t built much of a social network, Noonhat is a constructive way to meet people we otherwise would not. It’s easy enough to join clubs or attend events based on our hobbies. We do want to meet others who share our interests, some of the time, but we don’t ONLY want to meet people who share our interests, all of the time. Lunch the Noonhat way helps you find new friends with new ideas.
Noonhat was founded by Seattle’s Brian Dorsey, so for us and other locals especially, it’s a well run service. Dorsey told us that some early users in other major cities have sometimes not been matched for lunch, but the service is growing quickly, so give it a try. Pick your location, date, and cheers!
We recently met Dorsey at a Seattle Net Tuesday, just a day before seeing Noonhat on the local Seattle TV news. Dorsey and Noonhat had been voted from an Ignite Seattle into presenting at Gnomedex 2007, also in Seattle. This is a truly creative, open concept built with free, open source software and on otherwise inexpensive hardware and services. Noonhat has gone from nonexistent to local to national and beyond, all in Dorsey’s spare time, in a matter of weeks.
We can’t wait for our first Noonhat lunch, and we’ll report back afterwards. Hey, it’s time for lunch!
This post was co-written by Brian Glanz.
