You're at a meeting, somewhere, and you want to quietly and unobtrusively take meeting notes or some other record of the meeting while it's happening, and you have a mobile phone but nothing else.
What tool or application do you use?
Mobile twitter. Twitter your short notes out to the world, or use a direct message to some bot of some kind that collects and gathers the notes for you. Twitter's mobile interface is fast, simple, and reasonably complete. Down side: no easy way to look up something about the person who just introduced themselves.
Mobile Facebook. Write on the wall of people (or your own wall) as notes come up, and then somehow reconstruct it afterwards. The people search tool is very handy for looking folks up on the fly, and you can send someone a followup about some question while you're still at the event. Down side: Slow enough that if people are moving fast you don't keep up.
Mobile wiki (Socialtext Miki). Keep notes on a scratch pad on a wiki that you edit on your mobile device. A perfectly good text input box and it makes refining your notes into something longer very easy (and you can go back and figure out more about what you missed). Down side: no lookup on the fly, so if you fumble someone's name you can't look it up.
Other mobile contact network and social network managers - both Plaxo and LinkedIn have mobile versions, and I haven't tried to figure out how to use those while standing up and listening to be a bit more informed.
Notable here is that there isn't a single Google mobile tool in the arsenal. The Blackberry native mail client is better than the Google Mail java client, and almost anyone can have a text box open, but if there's a mobile Orkut then my world of people doesn't use it.
If I had two hands free to do this I probably would have used delicious as a part of the process - I've gone to a bunch of lecture or seminar type events where my pattern is to google what the speaker says and delicious the results, and if the net is fast enough where that is you can almost do that in close enough to real time to keep up. But that's too much and too rude to do in anything other than a lecture situation.
Paper has some tremendous uses here - one recent event I went to I used some of Dave Gray's visual thinking skills that he's taught and put into his new book and did things like sketch what the speakers were wearing in addition to taking notes on what they were saying. I have a much clearer visual memory of that event, but I don't remember anyone's names.
A work in process to be sure. There were 11 tables full of people, and I got almost everyone's names, and didn't quite catch everything I hoped to catch; thanks everyone for lunch. The conclusion of the question at the table - would you buy a car from a bankrupt auto company? - is that most people would be worried about service and availability of maintenance and parts, and that a Cuban mechanic would be someone to keep in your rolodex, and that if the worst happens at least we can look forward to an expanded orphan car show in Ypsi.
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