A conversation with a friend a few months ago got me thinking about the dynamics of dating online. Here’s some of my thoughts:

A bigger pool of choices
When the bicycle was invented, men and women looking to marry were no longer restricted to their own village, but the next one. Dating dynamics changed with technology, as it allowed the pool of dating choices to widen. (Can you imagine how dreadful it was for Joe, the farmer’s boy, when Albert from the next village swept by on his bicycle and went off with Joe’s sole romantic hope, Zaza?) The bicycle allowed people who were restricted by location to widen their travels and to meet people who would normally be out of reach.

If the bicycle had the power to change marriage & dating dynamics, we can only begin to comprehend the possibilities the internet has started to give us. The internet gives us a very large pool of dating choices, if that’s what we choose to use it for.

Well, technically speaking: the internet presents to us a pool of people who are willing to engage with this kind of networking website (dating sites). Perhaps your ideal mate would shun a dating website. Of course, some people have met their mate whilst playing World of Warcraft — apparently group raiding is a bonding experience.

Representation
But on the other hand, perhaps it is understandable if your ideal mate would prefer not to bother with a social site that is, at bottom, a meat carnival of winks, pokes, and surfaces; and, at top, genuinely inefficient because your entire experience of a person is reduced to whether they appear attractive (photographs can lie) and whether they can put words together into a compelling sentence (they can get a friend to write the profile). Furthermore, the fact you have so much choice can also be distracting: most dating profiles tend to sound the same, and they reveal little about what a person is like.

The internet is, unlike a bicycle, not a means of travel, but of communication. The distance remains, and the question is how to try to overcome the distance by representation. How to represent yourself online? Self-construction is all too tempting, all too dangerous, and can completely mislead.

With regard to dating, I’ve concluded that the computer remains a barrier, and the only way around it is to get on a bicycle.

I haven’t updated for a while — that is because I have had nothing to say. I’m learning a lot at Future Platforms. They recently presented at Over the Air conference, where they demoed OctoBastard (which won best overall prototype in the competition). You can see the presentation slides here, and there’s a great summary of the conference by Mark Ng here.

I can’t talk about projects I’m working on, but I can talk about process. I’ve always loved designing with a computer and the immediacy and power of Adobe CS. Something I’ve found myself doing at FP is actually working on paper. So, while I’ve had mixed feelings about working on paper, I’ve found going back to working out my ideas on paper a huge relief, and very helpful for working out complicated layouts and wireframes.

Designing for an application is also very different from designing a website or a book: both entail rules and styles, but an application has greater functionality and a wider range of options, which need to be accounted for. Oh, and I’d prefer working with paper and pen to Microsoft Visio any day (when it comes to cleaning up wireframes, this part is sadly unavoidable).

Here’s a great article I recently read about sketching wireframes (via Andy Budd). No HCI needed, just HPPI (human-pen-paper interaction):

High-fidelity, computer-generated deliverables can be a perfectly adequate way to present your ideas, but there is something liberating about being able to break out a pen and paper and clearly record creative ideas without the use of a computer.

Can you see what it is?

The hanging comma, like an unfinished sentence, interrupted by the tiny portrait picture. It annoys me every time I see it.

Hi,

Effective in poetry, but bad in graphic design.

Twitter is the closest thing I’ve seen to the “crystal goblet” idea applied to social networking. ‘The Crystal Goblet’ was an essay on printing by Beatrice Warde which discusses the idea that printing should be invisible; that printed words should do their best to communicate the information instead of standing in the way of it, so that the “vintage of the human mind” isn’t spoiled by swirling ampersands and looping descenders.

Ideas printed in a book and means of networking with people online are entirely different things, but I really like the idea that some of the principles in Warde’s essay could be applied to social networking. Most basically, online services should be as transparent and camouflaged to human need as much as possible. Search is a good example: Google has become like the Helvetica of the internet.

Twitter’s character limitation has endowed each character you type into the box with extra value, as there are only 140 you could use. Twitter is naturally integrated into life, being very location-centric. In the past week I could have joined a friend in a cafe, an impromptu picnic, or a party, based on information shared on Twitter. Twitter is basically transparent to conversation, limited to 140 characters. 140 characters is the perfect length: long enough for a sentence or a question, and anything longer belongs somewhere else (which is why Twitter hasn’t completely replaced my need to blog).

The social dynamics are different from instant message, if you bring followers into consideration. It’s a hybrid forum-im-social network, which gives it a lot of power, and a lot of potential. The main problem for Twitter is that at the moment it seems to appeal mainly to geeks, while Facebook has wide appeal for everyone. Maybe it’ll take longer for its appeal to spread, and it’s still in an early adoption period…