Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

As I noted in this earlier post about Facebook,

If Facebook - or any other social networking site - hopes to grow and continue to be relevant and useful to the users who first made the site successful, it will have to be dynamic enough to allow its users to fine-tune their interactions and online relationships. Allow users to share certain information with their co-workers, another set of information with close friends, and another set of information with strictly online acquaintances.

Well it turns out that Facebook is now working on it. As Techcrunch noted at the end of September, while I was away, Facebook is working on something they're calling "Sort out your friends." A feature that will allow you to "organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what." Great news.

This addresses one aspect of a broader paradox of any social networking site: cultivating personal relationships is a private experience, but that experience takes place in a public place - the social networking site.

What kinds of real world environments overcome this paradox successfully?

When we socialize in the real world we gravitate towards environments where we feel comfortable being ourselves and can share experiences with people we trust without worrying about what a stranger might think. We go to places that we feel some ownership of, "this is our spot." Places where everyone understands the context. Your favorite bar, coffee shop, or even a certain spot in Central Park. All of these environments are public, but each one successfully allows us to have meaningful one-on-one or small group social experiences in the midst of strangers. Why is this?

In the first few years after I moved to New York, I was heavily involved at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. I took improv comedy classes and I performed with several groups. At that time, the UCB social community (or cult, as some might call it) probably included about 150-200 people. This was the core, the most familiar faces that you would see at the theater night after night, several times a week. And we had Peter McManus. (I don't know if they still go to the same place, since the theater has moved and the community has grown.) Peter McManus is an old dive bar a few blocks from the theater. On any night of the week, from about 7pm to 2 or 3am, you would see either some or most of this core community at that bar. Here are some key aspects of the environment that made it so conducive to our socializing:

• There was a bartender, and usually 1 waitress. These were the people in charge. It was in their interest to make sure everyone had a good time; and they were immediately available, in a very human way, to make sure that you got what you needed.


• There were two rooms. The room in the front included the bar. It was narrow and usually crowded. The back room had a row of tables in the middle that usually got dragged together to form one long communal table and several booths going around the wall. There were two kinds of booths, large and medium sized. The booths were prime real-estate because it allowed you to limit your socializing to only the people you liked most. Occasionally you would invite a new person over, a friend of a friend that you were interested in getting to know better. That person would come over to the booth, and your group of friends could try them out and evaluate how they fit in. The long central table in the back room was actually the heart of the party. Because it was less secluded many people would settle there; and when someone was doing a bit, by virtue of the table length, it usually had to be big enough for the whole room to appreciate.


• The beer was cheap. Honestly, it would be hard to overstate the importance of this "social lubricant." By the time the 2nd pitcher arrived at the table, the conversation was easy and people were more willing to follow their social intuition. I mean, honestly, you can think all the happy thoughts you want, but you're not making it to Never Never Land without the pixie dust, am I right?

This bar was the perfect setting for at least one particular kind of social scene - a community of 20-35 year olds, mostly single, mostly socially awkward, and mostly funny. And Facebook, and any other aspiring social networking site, can learn a thing or two from it. 1) Have a human host. MySpace has attempted to do this with Tom, every visitor's first friend. The founders of Flickr are famously hands-on, frequently responding directly to users concerns in the public forum. 2) Enable your visitors to seclude themselves from the public by varying degrees. Facebook has already done this to some extent through their fine-tuning of profile privacy; but they need to make it social, too. The "Groups" are fine, but they're too formal. Facebook needs to create opportunities for individuals to gather privately within the site in casual and spontaneous ways. 3) You need pixie dust. And I think the pixie dust of social networks, is simply sharing relevant links and content. The trick is, it's going to be different for each type of community - real life friends, online-only friends, co-workers, family, etc. Each community will be inspired by a unique spark. Each day I collect dozens of thoughts, articles, blog posts, podcasts, and videos, through a myriad of online tools - email, twitter, digg, del.icio.us, Netvibes, etc. And for each one of those pieces of content I can think of a particular collection of online contacts that I'd like to share it with. The special sauce for social networking sites, will be helping individuals to contextualize and then share that personally relevant content.

Of course, the added complication of the virtual environment, is that it's the bar, the coffee shop, the park, the office, the library, and every other real-world place all at once. And Facebook needs to build tools (or allow independent developers to build applications) in order to be flexible enough to adapt to each of those environments.