I am a huge fan of OHours … a great idea and a natural product for a super-connector like Nate to create. I’ve used the service to attend office hours as well as to host my own.
Nate – I know you’re swamped with marshalling the NY Tech Community, kissing babies, advising startups, and leaping tall buildings in a single bound … but if you get some more bandwidth to work on OHours, here are 5 features I’d love to see…partially because I think they are cool…and partially because I think they could help turn OHours into a business. Not sure if that’s your goal, but I can dare to dream!
1) Sponsored OHours – I think you could sell sponsorships for OHours appointments with celebs, high profile members of the tech world, sports stars, etc.
2) Job seeker tools – My guess is that a decent sized chunk of people who are signing up for OHours appointments are job seekers. Why not create a recommendation engine that would pull data from LinkedIn or Twitter to suggest which OHours would be best to attend given your career goals, companies for which you’d like to work, etc?
3) Help me meet who my friends are meeting – Like LinkedIn and Facebook, OHours should recommend to me who I should follow or with whom I should schedule OHours. It should look at who my friends on have met via Ohours and use that information to suggest people I should be meeting as well.
4) Invite other Ohours members to my OHours – Anyone who is using OHours has some level of interest in open networking. When I carve out a slot for OHours meetings, OHours should prompt me to invite some other OHours members to my Ohours session. It would be a great way to foster and build the OHours community and increase overall Ohours activity.
5) Ohours ‘prep’ – I like that the Ohours system sends a confirmation when meetings are scheduled to occur, but it would be great if that confirmation contained a little bit of overview info (pulled from LinkedIn or Twitter, perhaps the person’s last few tweets, or the like) so that I can get a quick half-page view of who I am meeting and what they have been doing lately.
What do you think? Leave me a comment below, or sign up for my next Ohours!
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