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.

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…

I’ve been following Twitter and watching the SXSW conversations unfold in the last few hours. Many have been focused on Sarah Lacy’s interview with Mark Zuckerberg, which are mainly negative. There’s a really interesting write up on the interview at BuzzMachine.

From Jeff Jarvis’s write up of the interview, this is the most interesting bit to me:

He [Mark Zuckerberg] says that Facebook is working on a universal need: connecting people who want to communicate. He says that someday everyone on the world will be using these tools. “It may not be Facebook.”

Interesting. Facebook will need to evolve, as I think that branding and advertising will only obfuscate a communication tool. I think that if Facebook really wants to “connect people who want to communicate”, it needs to be as invisible as possible, and it needs to be open as possible. I want to easily sync my contacts with my address book, my phone, etc. I want to take data out.

Transparency in social networking: a good analogy would be plain typography, or the principles set out in Beatrice Warde’s ‘The Crystal Goblet‘: basically, that printing should be invisible, so that words and ideas can be read and understood as clearly as possible. A real communication tool must give privacy, yes, but also transparency and flexibility.

I’ve been trying Twitter for a couple of days (I’m eclat), after failing to see the point the first time I used it.

I now “get” Twitter and think I’ll be using it frequently in the future. It’s great for feeling connected to the people I know, to see which of my friends are around, and what they’re doing and thinking about. I’ve found I prefer to read tweets from people I know, rather than people I don’t know — though I’ve added a few bloggers because I’m interested in their updates. I also added a twittering plant which recently enjoyed media attention.

So far, I really like Twitter. I also really like Facebook, so I’m going to briefly compare my loves.

When I log in to Facebook, I like to see which of my friends have updated their information, photos, status, posted items, etc. Interaction via comments and messages goes on, but that’s not the focus of Facebook, and that’s not what I chiefly follow on Facebook.

One focus is on building a social network out of existing relationships. Another focus is on gathering and presenting information and facts about people. Photographs (visual facts, I guess), interests, favourite music, bio, etc.

Facebook has a Twitter-like status feature, but there is no way to reply directly to status updates. For that reason, status updates read as a monologue; they’re not part of a dialogue. Status updates feel lonely, somehow — they don’t invite longer conversations.

I realise now that this is why I feel uncomfortable about updating my status on Facebook. Self-consciousness; but also: who am I talking to? Who do I think is interested in what I’m doing or thinking about? Shouldn’t this invite or provoke a longer conversation? Perhaps it’s intentional that status updates are stand-alone, but I often find myself wanting to comment on a status update.

On Twitter, the focus is on people, stories, conversation. Facts get revealed through conversations on Twitter, rather than served up on a self-edited webpage, as they are on Facebook.

So far, I really like Twitter. I don’t think it can replace or compete with Facebook, because they’re good for different things.