Friends & Strangers Blog

Six Reasons You May Want to Meet New People

Bars. Concerts...maybe. Sports events, the coffee bar, at church. Work. Options for meeting new people offline are limited, and can be hit-or-miss. Social networking sites have changed all of this, making it easier than ever for you to find someone who shares enough of your interests to want to meet in person. But shared interests is a pretty broad description. In this post we're going to look at the different reaosn you might want to meet someone new and how effective social networks are for each type of goal.

 

There are typically six reasons why you might want to meet new people. Your situation probably includes aspects of more than one of the reasons, so don't think you need to fit neatly into one of these categories. Using these the groupings just makes it easier to talk about.

 

New in Town

It's tough to start over after moving to a new town or city. If you are lucky you might have friends, family or an introduction to people in town. It's just as likely that you don't. This is a pretty lonely place to be speaking from experience. Most people will make friends at work to begin with, and this is a good way to start. However, it might get pretty old seeing people all day long at work, then after hours and on the weekend. All the time. Meeting people at work is great, but it's just a starting point.

 

Professional Connections

Professional networking is another entirely valid reason to want to meet new people. This doesn't mean a cheesy sales pitch or grovelling for a job. Meeting new people in your field, or even in an area you are interested in, is a great way to find a job, or have your next job lined up.

 

It's surprising to me that Linkedin, arguably the biggest social networking site for business connections, restricts users to a one-degree relationship. You can pay to contact, but this cheapens the professional character of the site. It would make more sense to have a threshold (number of reccomendations, number of CEO-level contacts - there are a lot of ways to do it) so a person could earn the right to connect with more new people. However, Linkedin is a great tool - use it to extend your network.

 

Friends

Someone to get a beer with, go to the concert with, hang out at the park, or play board games. Whatever you are into, or just whatever you can stand that your friend my be into. Most people extend their social circle through connections with their friends or the friend-of-a-friend method. This is great, as these new people may be more likely to share your interests and tastes.

 

However, sometime you want to create a new circle of friends, or just move circles. Hey, people change
 and sometimes that means you no longer have as much in common with your current friends as you used to. Whether its a clean break or you just hang out less and less often, sometimes you just need make a break from your friends.

 

So, how do you find new friends? If you are using Facebook, you can connect through an existing friend, or just search blindly through profiles (ones that are public) and try to strike up a conversation. Twitter is worse than Facebook for this - you can find more people, but you get a broken, sporadic insight into this potential friend. It's better than the offline alternatives strictly because of the number of people. You're just playing the odds trying to meet new friends.

 

Activities and Interests

Honestly, there are a lot of great sites out there to find organized activites that other people like. Craigslist and Meetup will probably get you the most people, but these sites aren't socially activated so your connections stop with those friends, unless you connect from there to Facebook or Twitter. If you can find an exact event or activity you liek and it has a Facebook fan page then that is your best bet.

 

Relationships and Romance

Finding a new boyfriend or girlfriend is tough. Dating sites are full or pressure - either you meet someone who you want to go out with, or you have missed an opportunity to meet someone to go out with. This is stressful and can leave even the strongest and most persitent people discouraged.

 

There are dating plugins like Zoosk that let you extend your social network and find others who are looking for a relationship. But these cost money and don't offer any significant benefit beyond what dating sites offer.

 

Hooking Up

 

This isn't what Friends and Strangers was built for, but we realize people have physical needs for affection, and sometimes that need is different than the need for a relationship. According to all of the info out there, especially this story from the about how STDs are on the rise because of hooking up on social networks. As long as you are obeying the law, site terms and conditions, and respecting other users, social networks serve their clients and this will continue. It's certainly easier to meet someone for a casual relationship using social networks than bars, classifieds or random encounters.

 

New Friends

 

Whatever your reason, and there are probably a few here we haven't touched on, social networks are the easiest way to make new friends. However, I feel confident there is room for improving the experience and this is what Friends and Strangers is dedicated to. Providing an experience, and the tools to make it easier to meet new people no matter what your goal is.

admin
5 months ago

Email Social Networks vs Social Network Email

 

Google Buzz

The recent launch of Google Buzz and their attempt to turn email into a social network is a huge misstep, and its not the first time this has happened either. Yahoo! Has added social features to their email that have fallen pretty flat. The amazing part is that the reason for this failure is simple and, uh, I think pretty obvious.

Email Contacts Aren't Friends

The main reason Buzz and Yahoo!’s socialization of their email fail is that there is no reason for people to connect, no imperative. Facebook does a pretty good job of connecting you with your existing friends, Friends and Strangers is designed to connect people with new friends and Twitter sits in a limbo between the two where its easy to find new people, but hard to get to know them. There is no compelling reason to connect to people through email.

Not Just Personal Contacts

People don’t want to have their email contacts all of a sudden activated so they can talk to each other. Think about how you use email: You likely have several email addresses, some used for signing up to those registration-required sites, others for friends, others for work. Yeah right. Most people are not that organized and their email contacts are probably a good mix of all the above. I don’t want websites I signed up for to be able to connect to my personal contacts, to my friends, and to my business contacts.

It’s not a question of privacy, it’s a question of structure. Most people have a list of friends and create that list with the knowledge that those friends may connect to each other through the social graph. People simply don’t use email that way, and have not thought about the social graph while using their email accounts.

Dating Email

Then think about people who are actively dating. Even if you play the game on the up-and-up, if you’re going out with different people connecting those contacts and letting them talk could be awkward at best, messy and a whirlwind of drama at the worst.

Make it Social First

An email service would need to be positioned as a social network to start with, but then why not just build a real social network? Google and Yahoo! are trying to bootstrap their email assets to makeup for their lack of success with their social networking properties, and they have been in such a rush to do so that they have failed to ask the basic question: How are users connecting, and why?

You can’t take a short cut with social network: A social networking site needs to help its users connect to people they couldn’t connect to before, and that they actually want to connect to.

admin
6 months ago

Inaugural Blog Entry

This is the first entry in the Friends and Strangers official blog. We’re just gearing up for the private beta phase after having worked on the site for over a year. It’s a very exciting time for us, and very busy as we work to tie up loose ends and put final touches on features. However, it’s important to take a step back and think about what is coming in the future.

We’ll be using this blog to update the public on the innovative and fun social networking features that will be coming out. We’ll also work to publish observations about how people use the site as well as tips, cheat sheets and other useful guides to help our users.

We are the first social networking site to allow users to create multiple profiles. It will be interesting to see how these are used, and we will monitor this carefully to help users make the most of this feature. However, we fully expect to be surprised about exciting ways people use this feature to meet new friends, for business, for fun, or whatever suits you. We’ll be watching closely to make sure nothing happens that could negatively impact our users, but also leaving the evolution of this feature in the hands of our users.

The plan and roadmap is for us to remain in private beta for the next few weeks while we add the last core features, and roll out a few more fun features. Users can signup now and we are generally approving batches of new users for the private beta once per day. Once we end the private beta and move to a public beta, registration will be open to all users. During this time we’ll be adding additional features and some features may have visible changes.

Once we’re fully satisfied with the core features and those we expect to be the most fun, we’ll take the beta label off the site. Yes, this will be largely symbolic, but it is important for our users and the public to know we are firing on all cylinders and ready for growth.

It’s an exciting time. People will finally have a social networking site that is explicitly built to help them meet new people. We have big plans, and our users are at the center of those plans. Thank you, and stay tuned!

admin
7 months ago