Friends, IRL and Online

About a month and a half ago I moved from New York to Montreal, but this weekend I made a quick trip back to NY mostly just to see some friends again. Though I’ve tried to keep in touch with people on the phone, gchat, facebook, and so on, there really is no substitute for hanging out and talking in real life. So I saw some really great friends who I miss, ate some food that I miss and, though I was now a tourist, still stayed as far away from Times Square as possible.

It was a really fun weekend, but looking back it made me think a little about how social networks and apps are developing to close the gap between artificial online interaction and the power of the real life interactions I felt this weekend. With this in mind, I see three arguably distinct categories of social networks that I wanted to explore: information sharing networks, interactive networks and meetup/activity networks.

Information Sharing Networks: At its core facebook is what I think of as an information sharing network. People share photos, links and status updates with each other. Twitter is another obvious example. A more niche example might be foodspotting. Path bears mentioning because it’s basically an information sharing network as well, but its focus on closer friends and more intimate updates is a focus that I think is trying to capitalize on the feelings that normally result from real life interactions like those that hit home for me this weekend.

Interactive Networks: What’s a big part of the success of turntable? I think it’s pretty clear that the fun and engaging user experience and design are a huge factor. Turntable gives users the ability to experience music together. You can find a room you like, follow DJs (just other users), chat and dance to show appreciation for a DJ’s choice. It’s not real life, but it’s much realer than iTunes or Spotify (even with the facebook integration, which I touch on later). There’s a community, there’s discovery and learning, there’s an added dimension of pure fun. That’s what you get hanging out with good friends, and turntable was able to capture a lot of that magic in a simple and engaging product. Shaker is another great example, since in their own words “Shaker brings social networks to life by allowing people to interact in real time in a shared environment, making the online social experience of hanging out with friends and meeting new people, feel natural finally.” A lot of the Zynga games have a similar quality and add a similar element to the facebook experience. On a smaller scale, old-school message boards or even something like fantasy football leagues have many of these qualities as well.

Meetup/Activity Networks: This is where the social web intersects head on with the real world. Here, the social network serves in many ways as an activity planner and facilitator. I want to shout out at least one Montreal company, so Training Mobs is a good example here. Through Training Mobs, users can find and share group workouts. You can meet new people or just organize and keep track of activities with existing friends, but either way the site is encouraging real life interactions. Meetup is of course the most obvious example here.

Takeaways

I love information sharing networks as much as the next guy who spends way too much time on facebook and twitter. Hell, I’ve even been planning out a possible niche social network as a startup of my own, but I think a lot of the changes we’ve seen come to facebook and twitter can largely be explained by a desire to harness some of the satisfaction we get from natural, offline shared experiences.

Facebook may never be a substitute for having dinner with your friends, but the ability to share a wider range of activities with the new additions to the social graph, the ability to watch movies friends are watching, listen to music with them and chat while doing so clearly moves the facebook experience much further into the realm of what I called an experience network. Third party products like Shaker and social games built on the facebook platform only further reinforce this movement.

Similarly, twitter’s new design with the prominence of terms like “connect” and “discover” encourages users to connect with more people and experience events like political debates, sporting events and breaking news together as a community. Experiencing events in real-time and following the reactions of others has long been a strength of twitter and its trending topics, but the new new twitter verbiage makes it even clearer that the company wants to encourage the type of interaction that traditionally was reserved for smaller groups of close friends hanging out together or talking on the phone.

Incorporating real life meetings into a social network is still a little more tricky and somewhat more rare or subtle. A lot of people clearly use facebook to create and invite people to events and check-ins and/or foursquare integration can create new opportunities for real life interactions, the roots of which can be traced back to facebook. Because so many people share real-time updates on twitter and also link their foursquare and twitter accounts, it too can lead to unplanned interactions in this way. Another example is that you can also use twitter to send a message to a business while in their establishment which can lead to great new experiences. Tweet at a chef while at their restaurant or before you head over, for example, and if they have time they might come by to chat or send out an extra dish for you to try. Your real life experience is improved because of the social network.

The key is that all entrepreneurs with social products need to think about how to harness the best parts of real life social interactions as part of their UX and feature set, how to encourage and improve offline experiences and then how to best bring those offline experiences back onto the social network. There’s no substitute for great friends and I’m thankful for mine in New York and elsewhere, but the more social networks can create opportunities to interact, learn, discover and just have fun together online like we do in person while also improving our experiences offline, the more successful and powerful they will become.