Of all your friends on Facebook, howmany have you met in real life? If you're like most people the answeris most if not all. SNSs work to catalogue existing relationships.They are tools to archive people you've already met in real life, andthis archiving constitutes the only direct social networking servicethey provide. As the populations of SNSs are composed of people usershave already met, and they only function to compile them together,they are 'past based'. You'vealready done the networking, in real life, but in the past.

Think of the last 3 friends you made ? they were probablyintroduced to you by someone else, or for the more gregarious,approached directly by you or vice versa. Perhaps you met at aconference, caf?, ball game or a party. Regardless, theconnections were made in real life, in the moment.

And what precipitates the connections? More often than not it is anintroduction through a friend, work colleague or family member ?people you trust and whose judgements you trust. The introducer actsas a 'social commonality' a social agent you have in common withsomeone else. The principle of homophily posits that people are morelikely to bond with people similar to themselves, and similaritiesare identified in people between whom a relationship has yet to formthrough commonalities. This principle is more familiarly expressedthrough the adage ?birds of a feather flock together.?

Commonalities can come in myriad forms. You may be interested in thesame things as someone else, work in the same company or in a relatedindustry. All work to identify people similar to you. You wouldalmost unavoidably strike up a conversation and feel a strong senseof affinity with someone you find out knows 4 of the same people youdo, is your age, went to the same school, worked in the same industryand like you is an avid tennis player. Any one of these would suggestyou are alike in some way, the combination enforces the suggestion,and in this hypothetical, would create an irrepressible urge tocommunicate or bond in some way.

There is one other commonality that occurs in real life socialnetworking that is often unconsciously overlooked ? physicalproximity. This 'proximity commonality' has significance when we,perhaps irrationally, consider all the places one could be at acertain time and place. Something, whether it be habitude, similarcircumstance (or just dumb luck ? a variable I think humansnaturally find difficult to treat dispassionately andnon-fatalistically) 'led you together', and, of course, created thepossibility of a physical interaction, the value of which I believewill never be reproducible or communicable online to the same degree.

I decided to discuss the 'proximity commonality' independently forgood reason. It is the one critical commonality that can't bereadily, if at all, identified using online social networkingservices. It's the main reason why people only populate their SNSfriend and contact lists with people they know (one glaring exceptionis online dating ? explicable by the mutually understood purpose ofeveryone's subscription). SNSs, of course, do allow you to identifycommonalities you can't readily in real life. With a few clicks youcan filter lists of users by age, industry or interest commonality,something impossible to do in real life without everyone wearing iton their shirts, so to speak.

Considering the vast panoply of assumptions I've made in this shortarticle true, if only for conversation's sake, the optimal socialnetworking tool would be a combined approach. A service orapplication to use in real life that would allow you to identifycommonalities with the people around you, with the proximitycommonality already given.

Feel free to contact me directly to discuss, for sources and / orliterature on the topic at c.kahler [at] urbian.org or learn more byvisiting www.urbian.org.