16th
4/90: Matchmaker
This will be a quick one today, due to a bad cold and a long week.
I’m fortunate enough to be able to travel to many conferences a year (hotel conference rooms and high-carb buffets are very glamorous), providing me with introductions to interesting people from all around the world. Although I have many great conversations with people who have complimentary interests, disappointingly few of the plans for great things that are made over coffee end up turning into something. Upon returning home, it’s back to the routine and firefighting of daily life.
Similarly, I often run into interesting people around town, but it almost always takes a few false starts before a project can really happen. I suspect that for many people, meeting once isn’t enough; we simply have to keep running into people in order for a collaboration to take off. I also observe people in my social network who enable these repeat connections. These matchmakers are the true connectors, not just bringing together interesting people, but repeatedly telling them that the have to talk to a certain interesting person again and again.
I think there is a potential for a similar matchmaker system to help push acquaintances over a collaborator threshold. Perhaps instead of the usual business card exchange, two individuals interested in following up on conversation could mutually submit contact information to a system that would remind both of them that they should talk again several days or weeks after a conference. Such a system would provide two-way reminders that the two people had an interesting conversation and really should talk again.
