+1 savrajsingh

what's the difference between a social network and a social utility? and what's the difference between a social network and a community? in many ways, they're different words for the same things - but there are gradations that i've noticed:

i'll start with what i know - communities form from commonalities, through the shared assumptions & interests that connect people. HN works because we all feel that there are like-minded people here that will appreciate our ideas on hacking (or take an interest in arguing with them).

social networking is a bit more ambiguous as it's a newer term, but i'll venture that most people use it to mean a collection of connectible communities. social networks are a community of communities, making a more basic assumption/interest commonality that allows for a much wider/diffuse audience. myspace connects those that feel it provides a creative conduit for representing their personality, whatever that personality cares about.

social utility is even newer & is the carrot facebook is dangling for its investors. a social utility, by my understanding, is a meta-social-network. that is, almost purely a boring infrastructure play that could be successful even if it becomes invisible. it's a set of components/tools, sort of like ning, that allow people to create their own social networks - and by extension, communities - on the fly. that said, they aren't invisible yet - facebook.com is still what people know as facebook.

so how does this connect back to the parent? savrajsingh made an excellent point that the difference between a HN meetup and Hal's facebook meetup was shared interests/assumptions. an HN meetup operates at a community level, where the participants feel confident that if they attend, they will have something to agree or disagree with. a facebook meetup (and granted, i can only take this so far as i did not see Hal's original event invite) doesn't necessarily imply that commonality, rather, they leave it up to the event organizer because they intend to support any type of event. this approach lacks guidelines/constraints for people in Hal's position - someone who wants to make is 700+ friend list more meaningful. from the article, i can only guess that his invite said "i'm bored & in toronto - we know each other somehow, so let's play" - which is a rather generic call to action.

my speculation is that he did not offer a lot of his personality in the invite, rather, assuming people would show up & they'd figure out stuff to talk about. which is fine when you're reaching out to friends who trust you to be interesting, but he wasn't. that said, there were (hopefully) plenty of commonalities that could be leveraged within his friendset and were he to pick one shared by enough people also bored, he'd have much more luck the next time. given that he was in toronto doing this around election time, it seems inviting people out to talk about politics (sports, tv, books, ad infinum) would be one way to create a commonality with his stranger-friends. the key is finding something to fall back on so when the small talk runs out, the conversation doesn't languish in disconnected/unfamiliar silence.

^that last bit is something important to keep in mind when building a product that you're trying to market, too, if you intend for people to talk/form a community around it. give them a seed to respond to.

When I see someone with 700 Facebook friends or more, my first thought is that they're most probably friend collectors. They either add every profile they come across, or they accept every invite they get (usually from other friend collector). For these people, the Facebook experience probably sucks because there is very little personality to it. And, obviously, he shouldn't have expected people to show up to meet someone they don't even know and have nothing in common with.

Perhaps it is true that people don't take invites on facebook seriously as they can see the list of people. If there are too many people invited, they might not feel obligated to respond. What if you had a dedicated invite service and you could not observe the number of people coming (say to a dinner or a party etc). Would you feel more obliged to respond?

Ouch. Unsurprising though, when you consider how hard it is to organise your "real" friends to head out for drinks.

Maybe calling it a "social utility" and not a "social network" is a stretch since people use it as a social network?

Clearly, your customers almost always define your product for you no matter how hard you try to paint it as something else.

You have to send out reminders essentially every day the preceding week, duh.

If you want people to show up, you need to phrase it as a neutral event. If you invited people to an art gallery or a concert where they are not forced to sit accross from a stranger, more would show up.

My Facebook friends .. let me show you them, My Facebook friends.

Enter Hacker News. I posted an open invitation to meet with Atlanta based hackers (btw I am not a hacker) more than one year ago. Now this is when HN traffic was probably 1/7th of what it is today and surprisingly about 15-20 responded and close to 10 showed up.

file under social-network-phobia

I have nearly 900 friends. I wouldn't call myself a friend collector though. The last 300 of these or so have all been initiated by the other party as I've moved and connected with different circles. This does prompt an interesting thought exercise...

My facebook timeline:

-May 2004 College Friending (200 friends): I finish senior thesis. Am bored. Hear about facebook hitting Princeton. I check it out. It's cute. I add my college friends. Zuck friends me as an early adopter. This probably gets me to 200 friends: the 40 or so people I considered friends, the 100 or so people I'd spent time with and then another 60 were people I knew through students groups, church or student government stuff. I believe at this point I had a detailed profile, was sharing my dorm room phone number and e-mail address.

-September 2004-August 2006 (200 friends): I worked as a summer camp counselor for three summers during time off from my first job, as a college admissions officer at Princeton. Facebook opened to HS students so my campers and fellow counselors wanted to be friends. It was at this time that I stopped sharing so much personal info, having begun to see FB as my personal address book, rather than an intimate conversation. I probably added another 200 friends during this period.

-September 2006-March 2008 Grad School (200 friends): I started at Northwestern J-school and we all friended eachother up on FB as an overture to getting to know one another. Subsequent arriving groups of students also friended me. It's not a huge program and networking is everything in journalism. This was probably another 300 people, 60% of them are people I've worked with. The rest are people I've had class with or corresponded with in some capacity. Being able to get on the horn with a reporter at Time or Newsweek is just plain useful.

- Late adopter pickup (150 friends) - Over the last two years or so, as Facebook has become ubiquitous, people I knew in middle school and high school have surfaced to friend me. Even a few from elementary school. During a moment of absolute boredom, I tracked down my 6th grade crush on FB and friended her. So FB became a bit of a link to my past. Friending these people would prompt a short exchange of updates, followed by radio silence as we followed from afar. It's fun to know I've got ooooold friends in places like Turkey and London.

- March 2008 - Present, Readers, local bloggers in Chicago (150 friends): The last phase of this has been recently as I've published an online magazine about Chicago news and politics. Readers have friended me as have other bloggers and writers in Chicago.

At this point, while I share about 200 photos on my profile (none sketchy in the least) I haven't really updated it in years. It lists my professional background and interests, and that's about it. I don't go on there a whole lot, maybe once a week for 20 minutes or so.

That's how I have 900 friends, for what it's worth.

I used my wife's computer to look at my Facebook account once, and forgot to log out. She came by later, and happily accepted several of the friend invitations sitting in my inbox before realizing that it was my account, not hers. It never occurred to her that she had no idea who these people were or that maybe she should check on them before accepting the invite.

Friend collecting just makes no sense to me.