An interesting question is why 'physical' hubs work and why all those elements can't be captured yet online?
One key element to debate is randomness - pg does a good job I think in describing the value of randomness in terms of random meetings, shower thoughts - etc - There are many other examples of this process at work - e.g., in management/strategy: http://www.management.wharton.upenn.edu/siggelkow/pdfs/SOart...
It bears the question - what is this valued randomness in terms of social interactions? And how can we get it in online? Definitely not chatrulette :)
But not "hackernews" type of places either - because in here we are interacting in a very structured manner - on specific topics one chooses, etc - so it's not random - we are directing our thoughts, so we are not randomly exploring things.
How can we find that great balance that physical hubs have? Going to pick up dry cleaning you find a random guy and you say hi - because you have nothing better to do you end up chatting with the guy and discovering he's Sean Parker. But that won't happen online. You just switch to another browser window that is more interesting - no need for randomness.
Is the internet killing randomness? - Or better yet: how can we come up with something that gives that value to people in a way that is not chatrullette?? It should be random but within your comfort zone, in a way that is casual and not sought after (which is uncool and weird).
This seems a very important question. It's hard to simulate the randomness of the physical world, but it would be extremely useful to be able to do it.
One of the problems is that computer screens are just so small. If displays (or whatever replaces them) were bigger, what they were displaying could be more ambient. There wouldn't have to be as much purpose.
On the other hand, maybe the difficulty of physically getting to a place is an important filter.
Thanks to your comment, I just had a lightbulb moment.
The missing piece of the puzzle is real-time online location!
The reason we don't have chance meetings online is that we are not aware of who else is using or reading the same site or app as us in real-time. PG suggests that it maybe because of screen size, but I don't think that's the main problem. The real issue is that unless it's explicitly built into an app, like a chat site, we simply don't know who we are sharing that online space with at any specific point of time.
Imagine if you could say, "Oh I was reading this random blog on Tumblr and was surprised to see Fred Wilson reading it too. Didn't know he was into ASCII art, but had a good chat with him."
I can see Facebook doing this at some point. They are already doing it with music on their site. And they already know which of their users are on a particular site at any given time. It's just a matter of letting the users see that too and interact with each other. Turntable.fm is an outstanding example.
It's bound to freak people out, but it should actually make things more open and real-life like.
The problem of course is establishing true identity, and given that we can't literally see people to know it's really them, we will have to rely on a central identity system like Facebook. A decentralized method of identification would be great but is unlikely to happen.
> The missing piece of the puzzle is online location!
This is something that I think has, oddly enough, gone backwards as technology has improved. BBSs had a very strong sense of location, while the internet is much flatter and amorphous, because everyone can connect to everything.
I think you misunderstood me. I mean real-time online location, as in I'm on news.ycombinator.com right now. My friend is on facebook.com right now. I'm not talking about geophysical location.
Oh I agree; I didn't mean that BBSs were tied to geographical location (though there was some of that), but that they provided a strong sense of online location. You were on a particular BBS at a particular time, not on another one; and you couldn't have 30 tabs open to 30 different BBSs. If it was a multi-line board, you could see who was online at the same time as you. That sort of thing made it feel more like a virtual location.
I'm not so sure randomness is the key. Randomness can be also be thought of as "absence of pattern". For me the key question to ask is to ask what role chance plays in formation of startups? Is it really chance or something process we can't yet fathom?
The last paper written by Alan Turing, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," [0] ~ http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing.... attempted to answer the theoretical explanation of the biological process that defines the shape of an embryonic organism from creation. This process is called "Morphogenesis" [1] This is an important problem because complex organisms appear to be created by some "random" process that organises what appear to be self similar cells.
A lot of recent work has been done to experiment Turings ideas on "reaction-diffusion" processes describing morphogenesis in biology and other natural systems to see if a) they can be reproduced in the lab and b) mathematically model them. [2] This begs the question, "what is the Morphogenesis of startups?" and can the same maths Turing used to describe the process be applied to startup formation?
There is a pretty good broad outline of Turing and Morphogenesis in a BBC documentary, "The Secret Life of Chaos" [3] by Professor Jim Al-Khalili on Youtube. [4]
[1] Morphogenesis, "the Greek morphe shape and genesis creation, literally, "beginning of the shape", is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape.",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis
I think that the hacker news structure has its own merits in terms of randomness which makes it as close to an online hub that currently does exist. By posting something on HN you open the idea to the community, with no idea where discussion can go. As someone who isn't from a Startup hub (Ohio), this type of directed random interaction and analysis has been crucial for me in helping me to understand the startup mentality, as well as providing me with the opportunity to rapidly immerse myself with information and anlaysis of the startup movement coming directly from the horses mouth (those within the movement). The members of the physical start up hubs of the world, contribute to the online hubs, allowing those outside of these physical hubs to be a part of our first start up hub.
Even physical micro-hubs like coworking spaces where I live in Phoenix do not capture the serendipity of interaction that Silicon Valley provides.
Here you have to consciously decide to go where other startups are at. In Silicon Valley I just get a cup of coffee and there's a conversation at the table next to me about startups.
Although, I have to say Twitter enabled more fluid communication in the startup scene here. Enough to where I have been able to spot a couple people not at the typical hotspots.
It might be that humans naturally possess superstitious minds that react strongly to elements of serendipity. Even the most scientific minds will have a hard time not having an emotional response to randomly getting into a conversation that shows potential of positively affecting their lives.
One key element to debate is randomness - pg does a good job I think in describing the value of randomness in terms of random meetings, shower thoughts - etc - There are many other examples of this process at work - e.g., in management/strategy: http://www.management.wharton.upenn.edu/siggelkow/pdfs/SOart...
It bears the question - what is this valued randomness in terms of social interactions? And how can we get it in online? Definitely not chatrulette :)
But not "hackernews" type of places either - because in here we are interacting in a very structured manner - on specific topics one chooses, etc - so it's not random - we are directing our thoughts, so we are not randomly exploring things.
How can we find that great balance that physical hubs have? Going to pick up dry cleaning you find a random guy and you say hi - because you have nothing better to do you end up chatting with the guy and discovering he's Sean Parker. But that won't happen online. You just switch to another browser window that is more interesting - no need for randomness.
Is the internet killing randomness? - Or better yet: how can we come up with something that gives that value to people in a way that is not chatrullette?? It should be random but within your comfort zone, in a way that is casual and not sought after (which is uncool and weird).
I wonder what you guys think.