10 ms·

The Next Facebook — Musings About Text Boxes

146 points by _pius 13y ago

piokoch 13y ago
"Today, your social graph lives in a brown box, called Contacts, on your iPhone’s home screen" Is my plumber a member of my social graph. Am I in the social graph of my clients. I doubt.
- da3da 13y ago
  I think the point was that now that so much of our interactions take place through our phone it is very easy to migrate to new platforms. Think of how quickly Snapchat or Instagram spread for example. I doubt they would have been nearly as popular if they were web apps.
- prawn 13y ago
  They did say your social graph lives in, rather than your social graph is. Ultimately you can add and subtract from your followed/following lists in an app.
tarkeshwar 13y ago
One way to deal with creepiness of friend requests is to not have them "mutual". Friendship in real life is one-sided relation and so could be on a meet-new-people platform. This is one of the insights that we have used at Chatimity (www.chatimity.com) - for building a place for making new friends online. It is like old style chat rooms but much more civilized due to a good amount of behind the scenes measures being put in place. We have had fair bit of adoption and continue to flesh this out more.
wellboy 13y ago
Connecting like-minded people, the problem startups have been trying to solve for the last few years, but still haven't succeeded to.
- vowelless 13y ago
  I think reddit has done a good job at it. Many of the focused, smaller subreddits are great arenas to discuss and grow in particular fields. /r/fitness and /r/keto are crucial to my improving physical fitness. And unlike dedicated forums, I can use a single username for participating in various topics I am interested in; like programming, math, cooking, dating, [local city], etc.
  - fabrice_d 13y ago
    That looks a lot like usenet in the old days... Which is not a bad thing at all.
  - bduerst 13y ago
    Reddit also has a tipping point though. For every subreddit, once that community has reached about 150k users it starts to succumb to the "Reddit" effect - effectively becoming dowsed in memes, puns, gif reactions, etc. I think it has to do with the fact that people are pandering for self affirmation through upvotes, which can lead to a decreased signal:noise ratio. Reddit recently made vote scores hidden for the first 24 hours, probably in an effort to stop some of this pandering.
    - rubinelli 13y ago
      But the interesting part is, once a subreddit grows too large, a splinter group will emerge and form another subreddit. (And I think hiding the scores is a per-subreddit moderator option. They are adding more and more of those to let moderators customize their communities.)
  - wellboy 13y ago
    Yeah that's online, that has been solved, I should have mentioned offline. Connecting like-minded people offline is the problem nobody has achieved to solve yet.
    - ValentineC 13y ago
ivan_ah 13y ago
Interesting comments and observations as usual. A guess regarding what the next social phenomena will be all about: value proposition: interacting with cool people that you don’t know
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tokenadult 13y ago
  value proposition: interacting with cool people that you don’t know Yahoo Groups hosted email lists have allowed me to interact with cool people whom I've never met in person for years. I value them highly for that. But that has never allowed Yahoo to monetize Yahoo Groups very well.
  - pnathan 13y ago
    That was sort of part of the point of Livejournal.
    - thenomad 13y ago
      Was and is. It's still a very active community site, and there are people (like me) who feel that it's never really been replaced by anything similar.
      - pnathan 13y ago
        Yeah! I've had a great affinity for LJ, and these days my private blog is on a fork, Dreamwidth.org. Hands down, I've never seen a better longform & community site design.
georgeoliver 13y ago
I don't use FB, but from what I understand can't people who don't know each other interact on a page they both follow, like an organization or a band? And once they've 'met' in that forum, an add or message won't seem so creepy? If that's the case, why is FB inherently unsuitable for the kind of interaction he's talking about here?
- agscala 13y ago
  I have a guess as to why that's the case: There is a sort of social pressure regarding the number of friends on facebook vs the number of actual friends you have. Adding strangers on facebook is sort of taboo in that it looks like you're just adding random people to boost your stats. I think another reason why the stigma is there comes from the day when the social-casual games were popular (read: zynga). People would add all sorts of strangers to beef up their stats in Farmville or whatever the game du jour was, and it was generally frowned upon
- draaglom 13y ago
  A significant factor is the "newsfeed" behaviour everywhere which discourages continued conversations - posts have a very short visibility decay period.
- ValentineC 13y ago
  Facebook's actively trying to discourage the sending of friend requests to people a person doesn't know now [1]. I had the feature suspended before, and it even prevented me from sending messages to chat groups where at least one party was not my friend. (I believe one criterion for getting the feature suspended was the number of people who said that they haven't met you before in real life.) [1] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=4008463549048 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=4008463...
nodesjays 13y ago
Great point about only meeting new people when it's deemed 'socially acceptable.' Sort of how online dating is the norm now and is far less taboo than it once was (though many preface it with the idea that their friends recommended it so they'll try it.. even though they're skeptical).
MicahWedemeyer 13y ago
Including SnapChat in here is interesting. I would consider it a perfect example of the novel interface and interaction being discussed, but it's also a perfect example of the potential for flash-in-the-pan. SnapChat is exciting now, but will it still be interesting in a year? Or will there be a new novel interaction that everyone flocks to? Somehow Instagram and Pinterest have stayed relevant, but I think the article glosses over how hard it is to create something novel...and then not be discarded after the novelty wears off.
dvt 13y ago
I think that the primary element -- note that this is nontrivial -- for the next "big" social start-up will be dealing with the creepiness factor, as you mention. I grew up with the internet and played video games (semi-)professionally. This means that I met a metric ton of people from the internet in real life so, in many ways, became used to the idea. But check this out; not long ago, I saw a girl in class and she subsequently showed up on my "you may know..." list in FB. I added her (I add just about whomever) and it took her a while to accept. I didn't really care, and we actually ended up being really good real life friends, too! Only later did I find out that she asked a couple of people who I was and she thought that it was (and I quote) "kind of creepy" that I added her. I'm a pretty good looking guy with a good job that goes to a great school. So why the fuck is adding someone on FB (that I happen to see in class!) creepy? Is it any more creepy than me just walking up to someone and saying "hey, girl, put down that cellphone and have a conversation with me." Obviously not. There is something, however, that keeps us from engaging online in non-anonymous contexts due to this perceived (and I would argue Western/American) creepyness factor. Like I said above, I'm sure someone much smarter than I will eventually figure out how to solve this very difficult problem. The solution will probably entail geolocation, semi-anonymity, and perhaps ephemeral (that is, non-persistent) IRC-like chatrooms.
- tarkeshwar 13y ago
  > The solution will probably entail geolocation, semi-anonymity, and perhaps ephemeral (that is, non-persistent) IRC-like chatrooms. Checkout chatimity.com (my startup). This part of your comment is spot on for us :) It is a geolocation based, pseudonymous IRC-style place with some behavioral tracking and modulation to keep the place clean and civilized.
- EvanKelly 13y ago
  I think I'll try to jump into the question of why adding someone you've never spoken to, though see regularly, is creepy. The fact that you were classmates makes it less so, but imagine if you were a regular customer at a coffeeshop and got a facebook friend request from the barista. Would you be a little weirded out? People post personal info (pictures, status updates, etc.) on Facebook, and I think the expectation when you accept a friend request is that the requester will at least make a cursory glance through your profile. If you, out of the blue, request someone you've never spoken too, I'd say a reduction in the creepiness factor could be sending along a message with the request saying "Hey, I've seen you around in class, I'm dvt". If there doesn't seem to a be any rhyme or reason to the out of the blue friend request, someone could just make the assumption you just want to look through their profile at their pictures and stuff.
nawitus 13y ago
>Today, your social graph lives in a brown box, called Contacts, on your iPhone’s home screen — allowing you to effortlessly connect with your friends on new social networks, in only a tap or two. Eh, way to generalize from 18% smartphone market share.
- awj 13y ago
  So ... are you saying that Android phones don't have a contact application, that you can't get to social networks through the contact application, or that you're bizarrely sensitive on the iPhone-vs-the-rest-of-the-market situation?
  - prawn 13y ago
    Seems they're being pedantic about icon colour?
goldfeld 13y ago
I think the house party analogy is very apt, almost too much. I love house parties precisely for the 'crashing into a new environment' feeling, where you get to meet friends of friends of friends in a relaxed and non-creepy way. Indeed bringing this experience on to the web and making it as cool as Facebook (and the opposite of online dating) would be a killer, sign me up first in line. The key here is culture, and for now the best way to find people with a culture similar to yours is through friends of friends, which is exactly why house parties are so cool. If a service gets smart enough to find people completely removed from my social circles who do feel like they (should) belong to my social circles, that would be a wonderful use of collective intelligence, machine learning and whatnot. That we could finally have something like this amidst this wave up of big data seems plausible.
- alenox 13y ago
  I think this is why facebook won't be the company to capitalize on this possible niche. People's facebook friends, and the things they share on facebook are all very personal. You share way too much for people to just talk to and friend anyone on facebook. When you go to a house party, all you bring is yourself, and your social skills. You don't show people your baby pictures, grandma's birthday presents, or your relationship status. Other than name and face, you can be fairly anonymous. There is also the aspect of a host introducing you to others, or forcing some kind of mingling of different circles of friends. That all seems like it would translate well into a social platform. Mutual friends, forcing some kinds of interactions between their acquaintances, where there is at least some anonymity, but not total anonymity.
  - goldfeld 13y ago
    I have been thinking for a while that what I get the most out of Facebook are events. But it's a poorly featured platform. Now take events (and local and mobile) and create a platform for checking what's hot right now. But don't focus on clubs and big parties. Focus on the the weird events, the house parties, all that stuff that's off the beaten path. Create a slot functionality so people can allow half-strangers (friends of friends of friends) to sign up for a slot, then the hosts can check before accepting or something. Also allow blind-accept events. The accepted/blind-accepted people are then given the address. I don't know, something like that. I think it could quite work out. People do love random, fun people when I bring them over to a house party (well sometimes it sucks actually, but those times also make for good stories). Foreginers especially. > Other than name and face Well some of my most amusing and memorable house parties were ones where I barely knew anyone (besides a friend who brought me over) and pretended that I was given a girl's name (being a guy.) Never gets old.
jonchang 13y ago
There have been attempts in this space before and they haven't worked out real well. AirTime is one such example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airtime.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airtime.com)
voyou 13y ago
So, the next Facebook is Tumblr? You may be a bit late on that one.
EGreg 13y ago
Yes! The mobile address book is the new friend list, and the different social "networks" are mostly apps. Some are platforms, such as Google or Facebook, on which other apps can be built. But you no longer no need to be tied to a platform exclusively. That said, you still need to build a LOT of stuff for every social app, so it would be nice if there were open source frameworks like Wordpress for blogs. I make a lot of these points here: http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platform/ http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor...
yanghan 13y ago
Interesting. The problem you addressed about interacting with new people in a comfortable way is a problem we're trying to tackle at Uni+ http://uniplus.me http://uniplus.me Right now we automatically match users similar to Facebook Graph, but we do it specifically on things people care about - people nearby who share your interests, hometown, classes, industry, etc. Our app is also university-only at the moment to filter out the creeps. We've also recently experimented with a location-based group chat feature in order to promote local interaction. I wouldn't categorize this issue in the same domain as Facebook though. Facebook is about two things -- sharing and friends. There's a mental divide between the friends and strangers, so users would never use it to meet new people. There's already platform to share things between strangers (reddit), but a platform to "interact" with strangers (which is what facebook used to do, but with friends) still has yet to emerge.
- dvt 13y ago
  This is an awesome idea :) I was literally talking to my sister about maybe doing something extremely similar as we were grabbing an early dinner last night in Westwood in Los Angeles (we both attend UCLA). Fantastic idea, and good luck to you sir!
  - yanghan 13y ago
    Thank you, that's great to hear! We've just launched and started to see promising results. Hope to make it more mainstream some day!
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  To me at least, Twitter serves that role. The asymmetrical follow model makes sense.
- kingkawn 13y ago
  I meet new people via Facebook all the time, and have since I joined in 2004. That never changed, even if the narrative about what the site is supposed to be for did.
hmexx 13y ago
"For those of you who grew up on Forums, you know that it’s so, so much more. It is inevitable that the masses will eventually feel the same way too. We’re just waiting for someone to step up and host the house party." The above was the rationale for building this: http://www.getmetaweb.com http://www.getmetaweb.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2uH_ZbAMgA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2uH_ZbAMgA
Raphael 13y ago
Google+ is already the next thing described in the article, a place to hang out with cool strangers.
VandyILL 13y ago
This reminded me of an idea I mentioned to a friend a couple months ago. The thought creeped him out a bit, but he didn't think it went to far. Basically, I told him I expected something like 4square to come along that tells you not specifically who (strangers) is at certain locations, but give a profile of the overall group that has checked into the location. The easiest example could be just showing what bars in an area are currently filled with liberals, and which ones currently filled with republicans. Maybe even a sliding color scale that shows just how political they are or how heavily the population of the bar swing ones way. However, I would imagine it to include a much wider list of attributes to include things like what type of movies and music I like etc. and point out what locations are filled with like minded individuals right now. Or even based on moods. Or even things like what I want out of the night (show what percentage of the population at a certain bar is looking to make new friends so you don't end up at a bar full of people who want to be left alone). There was more to it than this, but I haven't thought about it for awhile. A second thing this reminded me of was the idea of an icebreaker app. You go to a bar, coffee shop etc., check in, and then the app asks you an icebreaker style question. You then type in your answer. After you give your answer, you get a list of every answer by everyone else at the bar (but not their identity). You then get to pick one of those answers as your favorite, and the author's identity (or maybe just picture, leaving you to still ask for the name) is revealed. Basically it reverses the introduction process. Rather than thinking of something clever to say and going around picking people to say it to, someone picks the clever comment and gets to approach that person. Finally, what this article made me think of that hasn't occurred to me in the past is the value of these networks to connect me to people in IRC chats / forums etc. The basic thought is to create chats accessible only to people 2, 3 degrees of separation away from you etc. (or with x amount of common interests, or whatever FB thinks would be a good match). You then have an option to start a chat, and then anonymously chat with strangers that are reasonably close to your real life contacts. This means if you hit it off with a random person on the internet just based off random interests you share then you have an actual ability to reach out and get an introduction in a safe way.
ebf 13y ago
TechCrunch Disrupt Winner Shaker tried to do something similar. Never took off, however. https://www.atshaker.com/ https://www.atshaker.com/
nilkn 13y ago
Since it doesn't appear to be open to the public yet, I don't know much about it, but there's a startup which seems to be trying to attack the problem from this angle (i.e., removing the "creepiness" factor of connecting with strangers on the basis of, well, lots of evident similarities but no prior real life contact). http://ark.com/ http://ark.com/
- ripperdoc 13y ago
  It seems to be focusing on reconnecting with old acquaintances. I think that will be hard - that is all about the network effect, to make sure that the people you know are already on the network - e.g. the case of Facebook. Coming as a new player with that as the main feature seems difficult. Better to go for the angle of finding people based on topics or shared contexts (e.g. similar location).

146 points by _pius 13y ago

"Today, your social graph lives in a brown box, called Contacts, on your iPhone’s home screen" Is my plumber a member of my social graph. Am I in the social graph of my clients. I doubt.

da3da 13y ago
I think the point was that now that so much of our interactions take place through our phone it is very easy to migrate to new platforms. Think of how quickly Snapchat or Instagram spread for example. I doubt they would have been nearly as popular if they were web apps.
prawn 13y ago
They did say your social graph lives in, rather than your social graph is. Ultimately you can add and subtract from your followed/following lists in an app.

tarkeshwar 13y ago

One way to deal with creepiness of friend requests is to not have them "mutual". Friendship in real life is one-sided relation and so could be on a meet-new-people platform. This is one of the insights that we have used at Chatimity (www.chatimity.com) - for building a place for making new friends online. It is like old style chat rooms but much more civilized due to a good amount of behind the scenes measures being put in place. We have had fair bit of adoption and continue to flesh this out more.

wellboy 13y ago

Connecting like-minded people, the problem startups have been trying to solve for the last few years, but still haven't succeeded to.

vowelless 13y ago
I think reddit has done a good job at it. Many of the focused, smaller subreddits are great arenas to discuss and grow in particular fields. /r/fitness and /r/keto are crucial to my improving physical fitness. And unlike dedicated forums, I can use a single username for participating in various topics I am interested in; like programming, math, cooking, dating, [local city], etc.
- fabrice_d 13y ago
  That looks a lot like usenet in the old days... Which is not a bad thing at all.
- bduerst 13y ago
  Reddit also has a tipping point though. For every subreddit, once that community has reached about 150k users it starts to succumb to the "Reddit" effect - effectively becoming dowsed in memes, puns, gif reactions, etc. I think it has to do with the fact that people are pandering for self affirmation through upvotes, which can lead to a decreased signal:noise ratio. Reddit recently made vote scores hidden for the first 24 hours, probably in an effort to stop some of this pandering.
  - rubinelli 13y ago
    But the interesting part is, once a subreddit grows too large, a splinter group will emerge and form another subreddit. (And I think hiding the scores is a per-subreddit moderator option. They are adding more and more of those to let moderators customize their communities.)
- wellboy 13y ago
  Yeah that's online, that has been solved, I should have mentioned offline. Connecting like-minded people offline is the problem nobody has achieved to solve yet.
  - ValentineC 13y ago

ivan_ah 13y ago

Interesting comments and observations as usual. A guess regarding what the next social phenomena will be all about: value proposition: interacting with cool people that you don’t know

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tokenadult 13y ago
value proposition: interacting with cool people that you don’t know Yahoo Groups hosted email lists have allowed me to interact with cool people whom I've never met in person for years. I value them highly for that. But that has never allowed Yahoo to monetize Yahoo Groups very well.
- pnathan 13y ago
  That was sort of part of the point of Livejournal.
  - thenomad 13y ago
    Was and is. It's still a very active community site, and there are people (like me) who feel that it's never really been replaced by anything similar.
    - pnathan 13y ago
      Yeah! I've had a great affinity for LJ, and these days my private blog is on a fork, Dreamwidth.org. Hands down, I've never seen a better longform & community site design.

georgeoliver 13y ago

I don't use FB, but from what I understand can't people who don't know each other interact on a page they both follow, like an organization or a band? And once they've 'met' in that forum, an add or message won't seem so creepy? If that's the case, why is FB inherently unsuitable for the kind of interaction he's talking about here?

agscala 13y ago
I have a guess as to why that's the case: There is a sort of social pressure regarding the number of friends on facebook vs the number of actual friends you have. Adding strangers on facebook is sort of taboo in that it looks like you're just adding random people to boost your stats. I think another reason why the stigma is there comes from the day when the social-casual games were popular (read: zynga). People would add all sorts of strangers to beef up their stats in Farmville or whatever the game du jour was, and it was generally frowned upon
draaglom 13y ago
A significant factor is the "newsfeed" behaviour everywhere which discourages continued conversations - posts have a very short visibility decay period.
ValentineC 13y ago
Facebook's actively trying to discourage the sending of friend requests to people a person doesn't know now [1]. I had the feature suspended before, and it even prevented me from sending messages to chat groups where at least one party was not my friend. (I believe one criterion for getting the feature suspended was the number of people who said that they haven't met you before in real life.) [1] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=4008463549048 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=4008463...

nodesjays 13y ago

Great point about only meeting new people when it's deemed 'socially acceptable.' Sort of how online dating is the norm now and is far less taboo than it once was (though many preface it with the idea that their friends recommended it so they'll try it.. even though they're skeptical).

MicahWedemeyer 13y ago

Including SnapChat in here is interesting. I would consider it a perfect example of the novel interface and interaction being discussed, but it's also a perfect example of the potential for flash-in-the-pan. SnapChat is exciting now, but will it still be interesting in a year? Or will there be a new novel interaction that everyone flocks to? Somehow Instagram and Pinterest have stayed relevant, but I think the article glosses over how hard it is to create something novel...and then not be discarded after the novelty wears off.

dvt 13y ago

I think that the primary element -- note that this is nontrivial -- for the next "big" social start-up will be dealing with the creepiness factor, as you mention. I grew up with the internet and played video games (semi-)professionally. This means that I met a metric ton of people from the internet in real life so, in many ways, became used to the idea. But check this out; not long ago, I saw a girl in class and she subsequently showed up on my "you may know..." list in FB. I added her (I add just about whomever) and it took her a while to accept. I didn't really care, and we actually ended up being really good real life friends, too! Only later did I find out that she asked a couple of people who I was and she thought that it was (and I quote) "kind of creepy" that I added her. I'm a pretty good looking guy with a good job that goes to a great school. So why the fuck is adding someone on FB (that I happen to see in class!) creepy? Is it any more creepy than me just walking up to someone and saying "hey, girl, put down that cellphone and have a conversation with me." Obviously not. There is something, however, that keeps us from engaging online in non-anonymous contexts due to this perceived (and I would argue Western/American) creepyness factor. Like I said above, I'm sure someone much smarter than I will eventually figure out how to solve this very difficult problem. The solution will probably entail geolocation, semi-anonymity, and perhaps ephemeral (that is, non-persistent) IRC-like chatrooms.

tarkeshwar 13y ago
> The solution will probably entail geolocation, semi-anonymity, and perhaps ephemeral (that is, non-persistent) IRC-like chatrooms. Checkout chatimity.com (my startup). This part of your comment is spot on for us :) It is a geolocation based, pseudonymous IRC-style place with some behavioral tracking and modulation to keep the place clean and civilized.
EvanKelly 13y ago
I think I'll try to jump into the question of why adding someone you've never spoken to, though see regularly, is creepy. The fact that you were classmates makes it less so, but imagine if you were a regular customer at a coffeeshop and got a facebook friend request from the barista. Would you be a little weirded out? People post personal info (pictures, status updates, etc.) on Facebook, and I think the expectation when you accept a friend request is that the requester will at least make a cursory glance through your profile. If you, out of the blue, request someone you've never spoken too, I'd say a reduction in the creepiness factor could be sending along a message with the request saying "Hey, I've seen you around in class, I'm dvt". If there doesn't seem to a be any rhyme or reason to the out of the blue friend request, someone could just make the assumption you just want to look through their profile at their pictures and stuff.

nawitus 13y ago

>Today, your social graph lives in a brown box, called Contacts, on your iPhone’s home screen — allowing you to effortlessly connect with your friends on new social networks, in only a tap or two. Eh, way to generalize from 18% smartphone market share.

awj 13y ago
So ... are you saying that Android phones don't have a contact application, that you can't get to social networks through the contact application, or that you're bizarrely sensitive on the iPhone-vs-the-rest-of-the-market situation?
- prawn 13y ago
  Seems they're being pedantic about icon colour?

goldfeld 13y ago

I think the house party analogy is very apt, almost too much. I love house parties precisely for the 'crashing into a new environment' feeling, where you get to meet friends of friends of friends in a relaxed and non-creepy way. Indeed bringing this experience on to the web and making it as cool as Facebook (and the opposite of online dating) would be a killer, sign me up first in line. The key here is culture, and for now the best way to find people with a culture similar to yours is through friends of friends, which is exactly why house parties are so cool. If a service gets smart enough to find people completely removed from my social circles who do feel like they (should) belong to my social circles, that would be a wonderful use of collective intelligence, machine learning and whatnot. That we could finally have something like this amidst this wave up of big data seems plausible.

alenox 13y ago
I think this is why facebook won't be the company to capitalize on this possible niche. People's facebook friends, and the things they share on facebook are all very personal. You share way too much for people to just talk to and friend anyone on facebook. When you go to a house party, all you bring is yourself, and your social skills. You don't show people your baby pictures, grandma's birthday presents, or your relationship status. Other than name and face, you can be fairly anonymous. There is also the aspect of a host introducing you to others, or forcing some kind of mingling of different circles of friends. That all seems like it would translate well into a social platform. Mutual friends, forcing some kinds of interactions between their acquaintances, where there is at least some anonymity, but not total anonymity.
- goldfeld 13y ago
  I have been thinking for a while that what I get the most out of Facebook are events. But it's a poorly featured platform. Now take events (and local and mobile) and create a platform for checking what's hot right now. But don't focus on clubs and big parties. Focus on the the weird events, the house parties, all that stuff that's off the beaten path. Create a slot functionality so people can allow half-strangers (friends of friends of friends) to sign up for a slot, then the hosts can check before accepting or something. Also allow blind-accept events. The accepted/blind-accepted people are then given the address. I don't know, something like that. I think it could quite work out. People do love random, fun people when I bring them over to a house party (well sometimes it sucks actually, but those times also make for good stories). Foreginers especially. > Other than name and face Well some of my most amusing and memorable house parties were ones where I barely knew anyone (besides a friend who brought me over) and pretended that I was given a girl's name (being a guy.) Never gets old.

jonchang 13y ago

There have been attempts in this space before and they haven't worked out real well. AirTime is one such example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airtime.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airtime.com)

voyou 13y ago

So, the next Facebook is Tumblr? You may be a bit late on that one.

EGreg 13y ago

Yes! The mobile address book is the new friend list, and the different social "networks" are mostly apps. Some are platforms, such as Google or Facebook, on which other apps can be built. But you no longer no need to be tied to a platform exclusively. That said, you still need to build a LOT of stuff for every social app, so it would be nice if there were open source frameworks like Wordpress for blogs. I make a lot of these points here: http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platform/ http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor...

yanghan 13y ago

Interesting. The problem you addressed about interacting with new people in a comfortable way is a problem we're trying to tackle at Uni+ http://uniplus.me http://uniplus.me Right now we automatically match users similar to Facebook Graph, but we do it specifically on things people care about - people nearby who share your interests, hometown, classes, industry, etc. Our app is also university-only at the moment to filter out the creeps. We've also recently experimented with a location-based group chat feature in order to promote local interaction. I wouldn't categorize this issue in the same domain as Facebook though. Facebook is about two things -- sharing and friends. There's a mental divide between the friends and strangers, so users would never use it to meet new people. There's already platform to share things between strangers (reddit), but a platform to "interact" with strangers (which is what facebook used to do, but with friends) still has yet to emerge.

dvt 13y ago
This is an awesome idea :) I was literally talking to my sister about maybe doing something extremely similar as we were grabbing an early dinner last night in Westwood in Los Angeles (we both attend UCLA). Fantastic idea, and good luck to you sir!
- yanghan 13y ago
  Thank you, that's great to hear! We've just launched and started to see promising results. Hope to make it more mainstream some day!
hayksaakian 13y ago
To me at least, Twitter serves that role. The asymmetrical follow model makes sense.
kingkawn 13y ago
I meet new people via Facebook all the time, and have since I joined in 2004. That never changed, even if the narrative about what the site is supposed to be for did.

hmexx 13y ago

"For those of you who grew up on Forums, you know that it’s so, so much more. It is inevitable that the masses will eventually feel the same way too. We’re just waiting for someone to step up and host the house party." The above was the rationale for building this: http://www.getmetaweb.com http://www.getmetaweb.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2uH_ZbAMgA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2uH_ZbAMgA

Raphael 13y ago

Google+ is already the next thing described in the article, a place to hang out with cool strangers.

VandyILL 13y ago

This reminded me of an idea I mentioned to a friend a couple months ago. The thought creeped him out a bit, but he didn't think it went to far. Basically, I told him I expected something like 4square to come along that tells you not specifically who (strangers) is at certain locations, but give a profile of the overall group that has checked into the location. The easiest example could be just showing what bars in an area are currently filled with liberals, and which ones currently filled with republicans. Maybe even a sliding color scale that shows just how political they are or how heavily the population of the bar swing ones way. However, I would imagine it to include a much wider list of attributes to include things like what type of movies and music I like etc. and point out what locations are filled with like minded individuals right now. Or even based on moods. Or even things like what I want out of the night (show what percentage of the population at a certain bar is looking to make new friends so you don't end up at a bar full of people who want to be left alone). There was more to it than this, but I haven't thought about it for awhile. A second thing this reminded me of was the idea of an icebreaker app. You go to a bar, coffee shop etc., check in, and then the app asks you an icebreaker style question. You then type in your answer. After you give your answer, you get a list of every answer by everyone else at the bar (but not their identity). You then get to pick one of those answers as your favorite, and the author's identity (or maybe just picture, leaving you to still ask for the name) is revealed. Basically it reverses the introduction process. Rather than thinking of something clever to say and going around picking people to say it to, someone picks the clever comment and gets to approach that person. Finally, what this article made me think of that hasn't occurred to me in the past is the value of these networks to connect me to people in IRC chats / forums etc. The basic thought is to create chats accessible only to people 2, 3 degrees of separation away from you etc. (or with x amount of common interests, or whatever FB thinks would be a good match). You then have an option to start a chat, and then anonymously chat with strangers that are reasonably close to your real life contacts. This means if you hit it off with a random person on the internet just based off random interests you share then you have an actual ability to reach out and get an introduction in a safe way.

ebf 13y ago

TechCrunch Disrupt Winner Shaker tried to do something similar. Never took off, however. https://www.atshaker.com/ https://www.atshaker.com/

nilkn 13y ago

Since it doesn't appear to be open to the public yet, I don't know much about it, but there's a startup which seems to be trying to attack the problem from this angle (i.e., removing the "creepiness" factor of connecting with strangers on the basis of, well, lots of evident similarities but no prior real life contact). http://ark.com/ http://ark.com/

ripperdoc 13y ago
It seems to be focusing on reconnecting with old acquaintances. I think that will be hard - that is all about the network effect, to make sure that the people you know are already on the network - e.g. the case of Facebook. Coming as a new player with that as the main feature seems difficult. Better to go for the angle of finding people based on topics or shared contexts (e.g. similar location).