+1 savrajsingh

what's the difference between a social network and a social utility? and what's the difference between a social network and a community? in many ways, they're different words for the same things - but there are gradations that i've noticed:

i'll start with what i know - communities form from commonalities, through the shared assumptions & interests that connect people. HN works because we all feel that there are like-minded people here that will appreciate our ideas on hacking (or take an interest in arguing with them).

social networking is a bit more ambiguous as it's a newer term, but i'll venture that most people use it to mean a collection of connectible communities. social networks are a community of communities, making a more basic assumption/interest commonality that allows for a much wider/diffuse audience. myspace connects those that feel it provides a creative conduit for representing their personality, whatever that personality cares about.

social utility is even newer & is the carrot facebook is dangling for its investors. a social utility, by my understanding, is a meta-social-network. that is, almost purely a boring infrastructure play that could be successful even if it becomes invisible. it's a set of components/tools, sort of like ning, that allow people to create their own social networks - and by extension, communities - on the fly. that said, they aren't invisible yet - facebook.com is still what people know as facebook.

so how does this connect back to the parent?
savrajsingh made an excellent point that the difference between a HN meetup and Hal's facebook meetup was shared interests/assumptions. an HN meetup operates at a community level, where the participants feel confident that if they attend, they will have something to agree or disagree with. a facebook meetup (and granted, i can only take this so far as i did not see Hal's original event invite) doesn't necessarily imply that commonality, rather, they leave it up to the event organizer because they intend to support any type of event. this approach lacks guidelines/constraints for people in Hal's position - someone who wants to make is 700+ friend list more meaningful. from the article, i can only guess that his invite said "i'm bored & in toronto - we know each other somehow, so let's play" - which is a rather generic call to action.

my speculation is that he did not offer a lot of his personality in the invite, rather, assuming people would show up & they'd figure out stuff to talk about. which is fine when you're reaching out to friends who trust you to be interesting, but he wasn't. that said, there were (hopefully) plenty of commonalities that could be leveraged within his friendset and were he to pick one shared by enough people also bored, he'd have much more luck the next time. given that he was in toronto doing this around election time, it seems inviting people out to talk about politics (sports, tv, books, ad infinum) would be one way to create a commonality with his stranger-friends. the key is finding something to fall back on so when the small talk runs out, the conversation doesn't languish in disconnected/unfamiliar silence.

^that last bit is something important to keep in mind when building a product that you're trying to market, too, if you intend for people to talk/form a community around it. give them a seed to respond to.