In The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is “Relationship Status: Single” and creates The Facebook to get chicks. In reality, he’s been dating the same girl since before the events of the movie, but she got edited out. If the movie were real, Facebook would probably be doing a better job of living up to its potential as a dating service.

There’s a famous sociology result that your acquaintances are more likely to get you a job than your friends, because you already know about most of the opportunities your friends know about. Acquaintances know just enough about you to guess that an opportunity matches your skills and recommend you over a random applicant.

Currently online dating is about as sophisticated as online job hunting: you crudely filter the results and send an application to anything that looks promising; then recipients have to weed through hundreds of applications to figure out who to interview. Active match-making is unlikely to discover good matches and have can a high reputational for the match-maker cost if things go badly.

Online Dating 2.0 should work like this:

1. If I’m single and(/or) looking, I tell Facebook
2. I get expanded access to the profiles of friends-of-friends who are also single & looking
3. Facebook starts matching me with friends-of-friends based on profile data and position in the social network
4. If I see someone I like, I can message them directly (our mutual friend never needs to know) or ask our mutual friend for their blessing and an introduction
5. Repeat for friends-of-friends-of-friends

Since your dating profile is also your social profile, you don’t have to write it (or half-ass it, as most guys seem to) and you can’t lie: prospective suitors see a snapshot of you life, not ad copy. Web 2.0 theory says that position in the network is more significant than content (this is how the Google Algorithm works) and the stuff your friends post on your wall should say more about than you can.

I have a handful of Facebook friends that I met in real life, hit it off with and then friended in the hopes that we could grow that relationship. As Stewart observes, this doesn’t work.

There’s always the chance that we’ll discover some obscure interest or connection in our profile info to build a friendship on (shared interests is the standard foundation of man-on-man friendship). But I think the more likely model is that I’ll have an event that fulfills these three criteria:

1. I invite a lot of people, including acquaintances
2. Is comfortable for attendees that don’t really know anybody
3. Is compelling enough that people attend despite the opportunity cost

Other people don’t seem to be involved in events that fulfill #1 (I don’t get invited to many events unless they need bums-in-seats). Since I’m actively working on this, I suspect #3 is where I’m failing. I’ve tried dinners at restaurants, park barbecues, daytime open houses and evening house parties – these tend to get low response rates from good friends and acquaintances alike, even when there’s free food.

Can you, dear readers, brainstorm event ideas that might fit those criteria? Or are we living in a narcissistic wasteland where nobody risks attending events that might not be fun?

The most common complaint about Facebook made by people who have never been on Facebook is that it takes too much time. After joining, they quickly realize that their friends are not actually generating that much interesting activity (the days of death by 1000 SuperWall pokes are long over). Most of what your friends do is just broadcasting and interactions are generally small and quick. It’s not for nothing that anthropologists call these social interactions “grooming”.

The most common complaint about Facebook made by people who have suspended their accounts is that it doesn’t significantly contribute to their social life. These people fail to understand that the little actions of monitoring their friends’ broadcasts (done before social networking with gossip) and engaging in grooming add up to social cohesion. But what about all the broadcasts you don’t care about in the least and all the friends you never interact with? The problem, in my opinion, is that you aren’t friends with the right people on Facebook.

If you’re a promoter or political organizer or something like that, then your professional Facebook profile should collect as many friends as possible. If you’re a regular citizen, then I think the proper use of Facebook is to do high-quality grooming of a smaller number of people. I propose setting a fixed number of friends and unfriending someone every time you go over that number. This has to be a fuzzy process for a few reasons:

• not everyone you socially interact with is currently on Facebook (eg: your boss, your grandmother)
• after you lose touch with people you hang on to them for awhile online to reduce friction in restarting the relationship
• when you first meet someone you friend them as part of the process of building a social relationship, a process that might fail

I’m going to use Dunbar’s Number: 150. There are many reasons why this number is arbitrary, but there’s some precedent and it is a good symbol. I hit 151 friends today and unfriended someone I met only once many months ago. If you’re with me, join this group.