Accidentally in Code

Tag: relationships

  • Of Matchmaking and Meddling

    I'll Give You All I Can
    I'll Give You All I Can — Credit: flickr / Brandon Christopher Warren

    I meet a lot of people who are, or have a hankering to be, entrepreneurs. I don’t, at all. Is that weird?

    I do, though, have a hankering to make stuff. And something that I’ve come back to multiple times is dating facilitation. I love matchmaking. I’m terrible at it, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

    Notice I didn’t write “online dating”, just dating. Why? Because I think part of the problem with online dating is the online part of it. This makes sense from a business perspective, because online advertising is then another potential source of revenue (although not so much in the current recession) but ultimately the relationship thrives – or dies – offline.

    Anyone (anyone!) who has tried online dating seems to have the story about someone who they were exchanging such great and witty messages with… until they met in person and they turned out to be a weirdo, or there was no chemistry, or… whatever – it was a crushing disappointment.

    Check out this story about Bookio (warning: Spanish) – an online dating site with a difference. Men can join only by invitation (from a woman), and women can rate their dates. And – see the ratings for potential dates. Wow. Much more innovative. I love it.

    Here’s the problem with meeting up in person – you don’t know that person isn’t going to be a sandwich short of a picnic. You want to know who they are, what they do, before you leave the safety of your computer and venture out in public with them. Online dating has a high number of potential matches, so you can’t date all of them! Eexchanging messages allows you to weed ones it’s not worth going for coffee with.

    But, I organized two dates this week for other people. OK, one of them fell through and had to be postponed (extenuating circumstances) but it was little more than me saying to the guys – “my friend is nice and cute do you want to go out with her?” And to my friend, “OK, I’ve found you a cute guy, can you go out with him on Wednesday or Thursday?”. Then there was a little more detail – mostly centered around solvent/gainfully employed/not a weirdo. We’ll see how this works out.

    Can this scale, though? I’m a “connector”. I know a lot of people, and I love to build links between them. But, my network doesn’t scale. Also, I’m in Computer Science – how many women do you think I know? No, less than that. No, fewer, I’ve only lived in Ottawa for 18 months! Fewer. OK about right. And almost none of them are single.

    I know a lot of (straight) single men, though. Seriously. In Ottawa and want a date? Get in touch and I’ll hook you up.

    How can this scale? Perhaps the key is in how the two dates for this week’s came about. See I was out with a bunch of people, including – two single guys and another connector. So she was saying how she was trying to set them up but hadn’t had time to write them dating profiles, and I said, oh, someone I know just broke up and perfect, send me your calendar and I’ll arrange a date for you.

    Connecting connectors FTW! I guess what I’m envisaging is a local site, where I can exchange details of single people in my network with other connectors. The datee just needs to make preferences clear and share their calendar. We schedule it. This deals with the identity issue – the connector vets the people in their network (any psycho’s reflect badly), and if someone stands up their date, they damage the reputation of their connector. Here’s what I think is key – the online aspect facilitates, but does not dominate.

    No revenue model, though.

  • Reaching Out

    Yesterday Sacha Chua put up a blogpost entitled “What can I help you learn? Looking for mentees“. I’d been following her blog for a while now, and got out of the lurking stage and started commenting periodically, so of course I was like, “me me me!”.

    If you don’t read Sacha’s blog, go and grab the RSS – you can take your pic of categories too, which is neat. I should work out how to do that! In the meantime you can subscribe to separate categories by going to that page and clicking on the RSS icon in your navigation bar (where the URL is), here’s the one for visualization.

    But I digress, Sacha was really nice in her response and has already left loads of great comments and insights in comments on my blog. I’m looking forward to learning even more from her than I have been already.

    Credit: flikr / kelvin_luffs
    Credit: flikr / kelvin_luffs

    And now I have three mentors! Two of them even know it, as well.

    Tammy – I worked with and although we didn’t quite understand each other in the beginning, she thought I didn’t adore the Mall of America and was joking about going off to China to kick-box when we were done, she went from my boss to my friend. She’s super inspirational (she works three jobs and is still lovely, and still creative) and she (somehow) finds the time to take an interest in what I’m doing and cheer me on.

    Treena – I met at Democamp, neither of us realized the other was British from our accents (I think we both think we talk normally) and she took me in search of PG Tips. Treena gives me great advice like, “Schedule at 80% of Capacity” (yes, she is a physicist – how could you tell?) and helped me clarify why I don’t want to do a PhD. She blogs here.

    Sacha – as I mentioned above, I’ve been following her blog after finding it from one of her shy connector presentations. OK, I’m not that shy, but I do get intimidated by large groups of people and these presentations have some great tips. She’s also International (from the Philippines) and, I think, a programmer who speaks fluent human, which is what I want to be, too.

    Yes, I’m super lucky to have encountered these people but I think they key is to be open to the possibility that you can learn from people, stay in touch, listen, give what you can in return. Some people are (genuinely!) so nice that they just enjoy feeling that they’re helping.

    Sacha’s invitation for “mentees”, is really cool, I think. Indicating that you’re open and want to help invites people to interact with you. Who knows how long I would have continued lurking / commenting periodically if she hadn’t.

    So I’d like to pass it on: if there’s anything you feel I could help you with, topics you’d like me to blog about more, slide-decks I could make (particularly about Java, and Processing but I might also do some stuff on Haskell and Functional Programming) – tell me!

    I check my stats every day, I know you guys are here – but I guess many of you are still in the lurking phase. Talk to me! It would make my day, and if I could help you out at all, I’d be even happier.

  • Relationships 2.0

    I had an argument with a friend yesterday. He’d been a little economical with the truth and I found out and was angry. I found out via Facebook – of course. Facebook knows everything.

    This propelled me to write this post I’ve been thinking about for a while. The thrust of the talk that I will give in December is how much computers and the internet have changed the way humans live. Perhaps the thing that has been changed most is our relationships.

    If the web is now a communication medium, what more powerful way to change our relationships than to change the way we communicate? I know someone who broke up with her boyfriend by changing her relationship status. My boyfriend and I mostly keep our interactions off Facebook, but we do argue on Twitter from time to time – to the amusement of our friends. Of course, I’ve also seen people playing out their breakups on Facebook, using it as a medium to exchange those messages, you know, where he tries to explain that it’s over and she begs and pleads and promises everything to make him come back.

    One of my friends is dating someone who I consider toxic and try and avoid. Now that they’re “Facebook-official” I can’t use the reasoning that it’s not on Facebook and therefore can be ignored anymore. Wow. Taking a step back and looking at this objectively – I’m amazed that this is how we interact now. My friends and I have our share of drama, but I don’t think that as a group of 20-somethings we’re that out of the ordinary.

    Admittedly most of my knowledge of dating in the pre-Web 2.0 era comes from Sex and the City. But did people use to look up the people they go out with using Google and Facebook? Pick people up via mutual friends on Facebook? Analyze their date’s Facebook profile with their friends? Pick people up on dating sites? Check out the exes? Facebook increases jealousy in relationships, well yeah. Of course it does! What other medium can you use to obsessively stalk and obsess over your recent exes’s new girlfriend? Note – this was not my behavior, but the behavior of someone I knew. She was obsessive after her breakup – and Facebook helped every step of the way. She’s not alone, though – there was an article in September’s (UK) Cosmo written by a guy who’d found out that his ex had got married (via Facebook). He was quite upset, but is continuing the stalking – looking for baby pictures.

    When I last broke up with someone I quit Facebook for a month. I also started checking my email only once a week (after reading Tim Ferris’s The 4-Hour Work Week) and I happened to be working in the US (I’m British, most of my friends are too – this was before I moved to Canada). So I literally didn’t talk about how upset I was for a month. By getting rid of Facebook, I could just put dealing with it on hold for a while. I was working about 70 hours a week – it was helpful.

    However it got me thinking. We used to take our dumped friend’s phone when she was inebriated. Change “his” number to ours to stop the obsessive calling. What do we do now? I changed someone’s password, once, to stop the stalking. Others thought it a step too far, but it seemed to help (albeit temporarily). Our friends could be our will power before, but how do we do that now? I wonder if there’s a business model in a 3rd party service that locks you out of things, archives the romantic emails and the pictures until you (and a trusted friend) confirm that you’re no longer a nutcase.

    On a more upbeat note, you can also use Facebook to help create relationships – basing your dating profile on your Facebook profile and having your friends vouch for you. Niche dating sites are doing well, there’s even one that’s more of a matchmaking service (although results seem to be mixed). So it’s not like Web 2.0 is just destroying relationships – it’s creating them too. It’s just a lot of change.

    Some people still meet the normal way. I recently introduced two people last week, they’re getting on well so far! And in India it’s common to meet your partner at work – some companies even have internal dating sites! And, of course, if it doesn’t work out there are plenty of blogs by and for the dumped.

    It’s not just your boyfriend or girlfriend though. What about our friends? Like I mentioned above, I don’t interact with my boyfriend much on Facebook but I definitely interact with my friends. I use it to plan and organize events for my local friends and keep in touch with the ones I’m away from. I’m a big fan of ambient awareness or ambient intimacy, I like to know what’s going on with my friends that I don’t get to see that often any more. Sure, some people are less interesting than others but I can turn them off any time I want. There’s a really interesting NYT Magazine article about ambient intimacy, it’s long but very worth reading. Of course, there are mixed opinions – the alternative view. For younger people, “real” friends are on Facebook, apparently – due to ease of sharing and the level of interaction.

    What about, though, the people you’d like to just fade out of your social circle. In the past if someone pushed it too far, you could just “forget” to invite them to things. If you delete someone’s number, they’re never going to find out unless you run into them (and you can always claim to have got a new phone / had a problem where all your numbers mysteriously disappeared). Whilst Facebook doesn’t broadcast when you “un-friend” someone, if someone catches on they can definitely tell. Unfriending is this more active step to dropping someone from your social circle – but it’s so necessary, because there’s so much information on Facebook that if you don’t they will know what’s going on, maybe assume they’re invited. There’s not much overly personal about me on Facebook anymore, but even so – there’s enough that I’m just not comfortable with someone I don’t like having access to it. De-friending, or Un-friending is this whole new area of privacy and etiquette that there’s no consensus on yet. Will there ever be, though? We’ve probably always managed our relationships differently. Just now with the popularity of services like these, it’s harder to hide how differently.

    Sometimes I feel like Facebook is awful. In some ways, I kinda hate it. I hate how gossip propagates, how quitting it for a while is a big deal. I hate that some people don’t just fade away as you thought they would. I hate the whole area of un-friending, but think it’s necessary. I hate the opaque privacy settings. I’m a little weirded out by how it’s normal to start a conversation by, “So how’s <<X>>? I saw <<Y>> on Facebook…”. But here’s what I hate most – that I can’t live without it, because it’s so great for keeping in touch, because for those people I want on my Facebook there’s this great medium for us to interact and invite our other friends to interact with us. Because weird a conversation starter as it is, it’s a conversation starter. And I love having conversations in the real world, too.