When you network with people, do you often ask yourself, what can I do for this person, or what can this person do for me? MeetingWave (previously TravelersTable.com) is a new site that breaks down those communication barriers by arranging face-to-face meetings with people you choose in the places you will be. Their focus is fairly direct: to help you find new business, job opportunities, clients, or social contacts.
Members can post public invites in a location of their choosing to network over lunch, drinks, golfing, or any other social activity (in a business sense, of course). You are encouraged to describe the types of people you wish to meet. Interested parties may accept your invitation, but only you have the power to approve their attendance, so you maintain full control over who you meet.
Here’s an example of an invite from a job seeker looking to network:
You can also set up private invites in which invitations are sent to only a few selected members.
If you want to invite friends and colleagues, MeetingWave allows you to import your Gmail, Yahoo, or LinkedIn contacts. The site has a mobile version and an application on Facebook and Bebo.
John Boyd, MeetingWave’s founder, says that MeetingWave can be an especially valuable tool for recruiters. “Not only is it free to post a meeting invite to meet potential candidates, but our tool enables you to post invites to meet at specific times and locations with people that meet your search criteria and also control who you meet and whether the meeting occurs. MeetingWave is powerful in that you can develop personal relationships with job seekers. We are seeing invites posted for professional networking meetings to find candidates for open positions.”
Popularity: unranked [?]
March 30th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Humm interesting concept. The one downfall I can see is that this will soon become a dating site, or serve other purposes other than “business.” For example, in my area all I see are 5 pages of “Christians without a home,” “navrartri,” “dinner,” “What is He/She Thinking?” and “Employment Law Discussion” posted by the same people over and over.
No offense, but looking at some of the profiles on this site, there is no way I’d meet up with these strangers. If I wanted to network with people in my LinkedIn network, I’d keep that information in LinkedIn!
March 31st, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Hi Jessica – Thanks for the feedback. We currently have “romance” invites, but those shouldn’t be displayed to users unless they specifically search for them. We have considered building a separate site for dating and have spoken to potential partners in the dating space interested in licensing our patented technology for this purpose. If we proceed, people interested in dating may be funneled to the dating site and vice versa.
Regarding the quality of invites in your area, this is our next focus for improvement. Currently, recurring invites (e.g. daily, weekdays, or weekly) are displayed multiple times for each date making it look like the same person posting over and over again, when its really just someone indicating they are generally available at a specified time on multiple days (e.g., coffee at 11 am on weekdays). However, we plan to consolidate these recurring invites into a single line and give the user the ability to expand to see each date.
We also want to give the user the ability to hide any invites they have no interest in so they don’t see anymore. We currently have a “flagging” feature that notifies us of improper invites to delete, but we plan to add a “hide” feature as well.
In the end, each user decides which invites to post and which to accept so each member can decide which meetings to attend and which people to meet. From the Advanced Search page, you can set up one or more Meeting Alerts based on your search criteria and we will notify you by email of invites posted in the area.
We encourage users to create Profiles with background information, including a link to their profile on LinkedIn or another site, but also recommend members posting an invite request this in their invite (”Please create a profile before accepting”) and ignore any acceptance from members without profiles.
If you import your contacts, you can then easily invite them to your proposed meetings. You can keep the location private and we’ll only disclose to people you invite or approve to attend.
Finally, from your profile page, you can export your public invites to a separate site such as a Ning page or blog. This will allow your invites to be displayed on your site.
We have many improvements in the pipeline and appreciate your feedback.
Thanks,
John, founder