So the other day I was frittering away my short time on this planet (otherwise known as mucking around with Facebook), and I noticed the ‘people you may know’ list.
Hmm, interesting, turns out that I share a significant number of mutual friends with a group of people one might term ‘eminent’ – they’re not necessarily ‘famous’, but they’re at or near the top of their respective games, enough that I’ve heard of them and like what they do; and I just know I’d love to meet them, hang out with them, cook brunch, share haircare tips, you know the kind of thing.
Plus I think they’d get a kick out me, you know ? I’m a pretty interesting guy ? I’ve got a lot of interesting friends ?
Some people on this list (in no particular order) : Karl Bartos from Kraftwerk, Nik Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Golan Levin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (well, I met him once very briefly in Paris, woo), the DJ Rob Da Bank (shared a terrifying car ride in Ibiza with him ten years ago), Mark Moore from S-Express, Neville Brody (famed font designer), Andrew Shoben (Greyworld), you get my drift.
Well, being the nerdy type that I am, of course this chain of thought got some gears clicking away in there :
What if Facebook created a ‘would like to meet’ button ? Or rather, what if I made a Facebook app called Would Like To Meet ? Or rather, what if some enterprising person or persons unknown read this post and do it ? I don’t really care, since I have other fish to fry.
It would work like this : you go down your ‘people you may know’ page and hit Would Like To Meet for the ones you’ve heard of, and would like to meet in real life.
Then you rank them into some kind of order. For instance, I’d definitely like to meet Karl Bartos more than Neville Brody (better synths), and I’d like to meet Limahl from Kajagoogoo more than Karl (better hair); so Limahl gets a ranking of 1, Karl gets 2 and Neville gets 3.
Important: your WouldLikeToMeet list remains totally private. So if you’ve got an embarrassing crush on the Chuckle Brothers, nobody needs to know.
So, every Facebook user in the world immediately rushes out and creates their own WouldLikeToMeet ranking list. It’s a bit of harmless fantasy wish fulfilment. What’s the result ? You guessed it, fellow computer science geeks – it’s a graph. And we can compute all sorts of interesting things from this graph.
Of the many interesting things we can compute, one of the more useful is something I’ll call Potential Karma; and it’s useful because it leads provably to better parties.
It works like this : if I really want to meet Limahl, and you’re a mutual Facebook friend, then if you introduce me to Limahl in real life (and we really get along, i.e. hang out on each others’ yachts, become godparents to each others’ kids, or even – really the ultimate seal – just become Facebook friends), then you get Karma Points – lots and lots of Karma Points. So given any list of people, we can compute Potential Karma – the Karma Points you’d accrue simply by getting them all in a room and introducing them to each other.
Leaving aside the question of what Karma Points really are, and how to exchange them for sexual favours money, “how can this lead to better parties ?”, I hear you ask…
You’re having a party; you’ve only got enough cocktail sausages and Vimto to invite 50 people. Question: which 50 people should you invite to maximise your Potential Karma ?
Well, that’s pretty tough for me to work out, but pretty easy for Mr Computer, especially if it’s on a server somewhere at Facebook Farms. And you can bet that a Potential-Karma-maximising party would be the best party ever.
So Eddy, next time you have a party, invite me and Nik and Limahl, and we’ll like totally hang out and stuff. It’ll be awesome.
