Save vs. Geek

Years ago, before the internets, I was still a computer geek. I’d spend my time using my 1200 baud modem to connect to local Bulliten Board Systems. BBS’s had email, forums sometimes (rarely) chat, file downloads, and what were called ‘door’ games. Now, the internet is much better than the old BBS’s in a lot of ways, being able to email anyone, anywhere, it being easy enough that everyone seems to have some sort of presence, and the advances delivered by bandwidth (video would be unheard of, it took 20 minutes to download an image)

But there’s one thing that was lost.

The local community. Since a BBS was typically run by a person who’s close enough to be a local telephone call, the users naturally all lived in the same area. This enabled a lot of cool things. Just about everyone lived near everyone, there were meetups in the real world, discussions about local events came naturally.

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Craigslist have begun to pick up on some of these uses, but not ideally, because the categories are by town/school. Brightkite does things a bit better, but has it’s own problems, such as a tiny user base.

I live in New Milford, CT, just south of the middle of nowhere. According to Facebook, my ‘network’ is either New Haven, Bridgeport, or Poughkeepsie. Craig says I should be in northwest CT, new haven or fairfield county (one town over)

The thing is, my ‘network’ should really be something like, 50 miles from where I am.

I can’t blame facebook, the model was build around campuses.

Local news outlets don’t understand how to build communities, and maybe it’s wrong to expect them to.

With the onset of location aware cellphones, and software, these models need to change. We need the tools to find people near us, not just for dating, not just for events or resturaunt reviews, but for anything. One network, or a thousand federated networks.

More to follow

dan local, nostalga, social