Thanks to your comment, I just had a lightbulb moment.
The missing piece of the puzzle is real-time online location!
The reason we don't have chance meetings online is that we are not aware of who else is using or reading the same site or app as us in real-time. PG suggests that it maybe because of screen size, but I don't think that's the main problem. The real issue is that unless it's explicitly built into an app, like a chat site, we simply don't know who we are sharing that online space with at any specific point of time.
Imagine if you could say, "Oh I was reading this random blog on Tumblr and was surprised to see Fred Wilson reading it too. Didn't know he was into ASCII art, but had a good chat with him."
I can see Facebook doing this at some point. They are already doing it with music on their site. And they already know which of their users are on a particular site at any given time. It's just a matter of letting the users see that too and interact with each other. Turntable.fm is an outstanding example.
It's bound to freak people out, but it should actually make things more open and real-life like.
The problem of course is establishing true identity, and given that we can't literally see people to know it's really them, we will have to rely on a central identity system like Facebook. A decentralized method of identification would be great but is unlikely to happen.
> The missing piece of the puzzle is online location!
This is something that I think has, oddly enough, gone backwards as technology has improved. BBSs had a very strong sense of location, while the internet is much flatter and amorphous, because everyone can connect to everything.
I think you misunderstood me. I mean real-time online location, as in I'm on news.ycombinator.com right now. My friend is on facebook.com right now. I'm not talking about geophysical location.
Oh I agree; I didn't mean that BBSs were tied to geographical location (though there was some of that), but that they provided a strong sense of online location. You were on a particular BBS at a particular time, not on another one; and you couldn't have 30 tabs open to 30 different BBSs. If it was a multi-line board, you could see who was online at the same time as you. That sort of thing made it feel more like a virtual location.
The missing piece of the puzzle is real-time online location!
The reason we don't have chance meetings online is that we are not aware of who else is using or reading the same site or app as us in real-time. PG suggests that it maybe because of screen size, but I don't think that's the main problem. The real issue is that unless it's explicitly built into an app, like a chat site, we simply don't know who we are sharing that online space with at any specific point of time.
Imagine if you could say, "Oh I was reading this random blog on Tumblr and was surprised to see Fred Wilson reading it too. Didn't know he was into ASCII art, but had a good chat with him."
I can see Facebook doing this at some point. They are already doing it with music on their site. And they already know which of their users are on a particular site at any given time. It's just a matter of letting the users see that too and interact with each other. Turntable.fm is an outstanding example.
It's bound to freak people out, but it should actually make things more open and real-life like.
The problem of course is establishing true identity, and given that we can't literally see people to know it's really them, we will have to rely on a central identity system like Facebook. A decentralized method of identification would be great but is unlikely to happen.