After a decade and a half online, people my age are starting to understand the value of having an online presence. What do I mean? I mean, having an email address, maintaining a website, using some form of instant communication like AIM or Skype. I feel that folks around my age, who grew up with the explosion of the internet, originally started out carefully defending the information they posted online. Now, the benefit of having an accessible presence online, and instantly being able to access information from others in your network, is invaluable. This is social networking, and my peers are finally starting to understand the value of it. Folks younger than I generally seem to have skipped the fear of posting information about yourself and caught right on.

Foursquare is unique in that it understands that location is an important part of our identity. Just as we share our email address to receive the benefit of connected communication, foursquare understands physical location is a very important part of our identity, and allowing us to share that information with our friends is invaluable.

I would say that every couple of weeks I am in a situation where I would be able to do something beneficial for someone (like invite them out or go to their party) if they had posted their contact information on their Facebook profile. This is particularly acute because I have a smart phone, so I’m used to being able to manage my affairs in the field and I’m always a little shocked when I can’t solve problems with my magic phone. I encourage everyone to post their full contact info (after checking your privacy settings).

It’s not exactly clear what publishing our locations will achieve. An era of spontaneous interaction? Maybe it won’t make sense until a critical mass of people are doing it, so I’m going to start.

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.

It’s only so difficult to get people to log on to your site when they’re sitting around at home on a Sunday night. It’s much more difficult to get people to log on when they’re out in the world doing stuff, so the mass-building problem is much worse for geosocial networking.

Foursquare’s solution is to turn geosocial networking into a roleplaying game: your online character gains power-ups when you check in. The most common power-up is that when you check in to a location more than anyone else you become the “mayor”. In the system this doesn’t give you anything more than bragging rights, but FourSquare has huge potential for linking with the real world:

The obvious business model is to sell site-specific power-ups. For example, checking in to Joshua Tree in Murray Hill, New York gives you a douchebag power-up (make no mistake: this is great publicity). Another example is that the Hotel on Rivington in New York gives you the “I’m on a boat” power-up.

Don’t dismiss people who would buy a $16 cocktail just to ride a dolphin doing flips and shit. Foursquare is the anti-World of Warcraft: it makes a game out of going to new and interesting places; your friends can suggest places for you to go. And guess what, it just launched in Vancouver.

mavens

collect information (build memes)

connectors

are connected to lots of people (spread memes)

A single person rarely is both a maven and a connector. Mavens have content but no distribution channel. Connectors have a distribution channel but no content. Mavens and connectors need each other.

Gladwell claims that “mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”. But a maven’s power comes not from trading information, but from how many people they influence.

The Internet can work as a robotic connector for a maven. Mavens can write reviews, edit Wikipedia pages or blog about obscure stuff.

All of us are mavens and connectors to some extent. But very few of us come across enough specialised information to write a significant number of reviews, become one of the Wikipedia Cabal or have a blog read by more than your friends. Instead, most of us come across random bits of information that we don’t know how to get to someone who cares.

Twitter is a good place to put random bits of information. If there’s an obscure topic someone cares about, they can find tweets about it using search (especially with hashtags). If one of your friends knows someone who cares, they can retweet it – making the most of your meagre network.

I’m particularly interested in sharing local facts and event information. I come across lots in my day-to-day life that my immediate social circle is not really interested in. Hopefully if I start broadcasting it out, some stuff I am interested in will come my way.

This isn’t easy, but it’s at least straight-forward in a business context: find out what their chief challenges are and then keep an eye out for solutions. The classic examples are sending someone an article relevant to their interests or sending them a job posting to escape their current challenges.

It just occured to me that maybe a bit more of this sort of thinking would help be build my social network. I assume people mostly hang out with me for my wit and charm. When I do think about it, I focus on killer events: but maybe people don’t need more and better events to go to? I’d like to know what my friends need in their lives (besides money or a dancing monkey).

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 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.