tldr;
Why should you care? People have been trying to crack serendipity on the internet for years now. Serendipity is what people are referring to when they talk about why it’s so important to work with people in-person, etc - it’s the idea of chance encounters leading to interesting consequences. Across 2020, a shift occurred which suddenly made serendipity on the internet possible, and I’m going to talk about what the key fundamentals were and how they changed.
Ambient Social Networks + Serendipity
In real-world terms, an ambient network is something like the network of connections in a coffee shop or office. We’re always vaguely aware of the people around us - what they’re doing, if they’re moving towards us, etc.
Let’s run with the coffee shop example for a second. When you sit in a coffee shop, you’re instantly plugged into the coffee shop’s network. Every person inside that space - the barista making beautiful latte art, the patrons sitting around tables deep in conversation, etc. - is connected to each other in this shallow network.
When people talk about the serendipity of in-person conversation, they’re often talking about this network. A network defined by a space, where everybody’s connected, but their relationship is defined by the space they’re in - i.e. you weren’t planning to grab dinner with someone you met at the coffee shop, but suddenly you met, and now you are. Hello Serendipity!
Early Ambient Networks (what’s your address??..)
People have been trying to replicate ambient networks online since the internet began. Early message boards became ‘online water coolers’ where people were able to hang out and meet people.
However, over time, this form of networking lost ground to the ‘Facebook-model’: networks replicating your in-person social graphs. Instead of you ‘grabbing dinner with someone you met online’, you were ‘planning dinner online with someone you knew in real life’. There are notable exceptions to this - eg. dating apps, Reddit, etc. but these weren’t the dominant forms of networking.
When the iPhone came out, a new form of ambient networking was suddenly possible - location-based networks. In 2012, Paul Davidson - who would subsequently go on to co-found Clubhouse - wrote about this in a prescient TechCrunch article. Despite several attempts at this form of networking - including Dodgeball [acquired by Google], Highlight [acquired by Pinterest], etc. - it never really took off. More importantly, though, none of these succeeded at replicating the serendipity of a ‘watercooler moment’.
A design paradigm shift (*cue COVID-19*)
Until 2020, it was never really that important to replicate this moment online. While I’m sure remote teams would’ve appreciated this, the mainstream was still very much meeting in-person and designed around the concept of ‘chance encounters.
"There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat — that's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas." - Steve Jobs
The problem with Zoom calls is there’s no serendipity to them. Everything is planned - organized around white spaces on our calendar. The key question at the time was - what is the online equivalent of the physical bump? i.e. When I’m stuck on a problem in the office, I can just bump into my colleague and brainstorm a solution. What’s the equivalent of that for a digital world? The closest equivalent we’d had until then was the Facebook Poke. But digital bumps are easier to ignore. In the physical world, a bump is me occupying your physical space, in a way that demands attention. How do you occupy someone’s digital space, in the same way?
The drop. The replacement to the physical bump was the digital drop. This shift in design paradigms allowed for a whole host of new interactions. By ‘dropping in’ to your digital space, I could easily hit you up when I had a question or replicate the sense of people sitting around the same space, quickly pinging each other when they had questions.
How do Clubhouse and Topia replicate this online?
Eight years on from that article on Ambient Networks, Paul Davidson took another stab at online serendipity with Clubhouse. Clubhouse leveraged the digital drop, by recreating digital campfires. Interesting conversations happen around campfires, and on Clubhouse, anyone can start a campfire. Other people on the platform can move from campfire to campfire, sitting in on conversations they find interesting, speaking up when they wish to. However, Clubhouse’s approach to serendipity is still limited by this approach. Chance encounters occur when people are able to talk with each other, but not everyone can talk during a campfire. A coffee shop or office space leverages its shallow social network as a jumping-off point to deeper networks - you can meet someone around the water cooler and dive into a deeper conversation with them later on. This doesn’t exist in the current campfire model used by Clubhouse, since the conversation is primarily restricted to people currently on stage.
Another startup leveraging this design paradigm is Topia (and there’s a couple like it - Gathertown, Gatherly, etc.). Unlike Clubhouse, which is using drops for social settings. Topia is focused on the office space. This means that while they use the same primitive - drops, they leverage it in an entirely different way. On Topia, everyone has an online figurine, which has its own digital space - think of a digital representation of your google meets room. You can create your own office spaces, where everyone working can populate this space, with their figurines [if this sounds confusing, check out their YouTube video which clarifies a lot of this - here].
By giving everyone their own digital space, and using distance as a way of determining if people are in the same space, Topia recreates the sense of being in the same space as others, allowing for a whole host of informal interactions - walking over and talking to someone, etc.
So…what’s next?
So far, we’ve seen how ‘drops’ have enabled people to meet informally online. However, this is still not the same as a chance encounter. The bar for intruding on someone’s digital space is still higher than just going up to someone you don’t know and talking to them in the real world. Drops have allowed for campfires and office spaces to be recreated. But we still don’t have the online coffee shop - a shallow network of people with 0 social connection or reason to talk to each other, where the conversation is entirely driven by chance encounters. A
Serendipity requires discomfort. Approaching someone you don’t know is naturally uncomfortable. Rediscovering serendipity online will require us to find ways of making users on our platforms need each other. A coffee shop is a constant dance of collaboration - you need to ask to share the charging spot or jumping the line or a whole host of random interactions based on assistance and collaboration.
But when you have everything you need at the click of your fingertips, what need for collaboration is there?