Jeff Pulver has been running a very fun series of networking breakfasts the last year or so. The locations vary and he hits many major western cities around the world at least once a year. I’ve wanted to go for a long time, but always seemed to have schedule conflicts.
But I was finally able to get to the January 22 Boston Breakfast at Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge, MA. Lot’s of familiar faces, and it was great to catch up with Jeff, Brough, Geo and lots of folks from the Boston social media scene. And hey, I even had my few secs of fame in Steve Garfields 27 people one question video.
It’s a “social media” breakfast, because you wear a label with your status line, in my case “I like to keep things in balance”, but there were other great ones in the room, including “visitor from the future” and Jeff’s “the person you’re about to meet may change your life”. Jeff explains it in the Social Media Breakfast Toolkit Video.

The status lines make for great conversation starters, avoiding that awkward part of many of these things where you are greeted with “so, what do you do?”.
After you chat with people for awhile, you can “tag” each other to categorize them. Pretty quickly I collected a set of tags including “voip”, “cycling”, “Italy”, “pioneer”, etc. I had a few more but a lot of them fell off (better stickies plz).
What a unique and fun way to run a networking event. I remember talking with Jeff a few years back about online paradigms that could be ported to the real world, and I have to hand it to him for giving this a try and for the great event that it turns out to be.
UPDATE, Jeff’s got his photo album up, including your fearless author.
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