I had an idea for a new kind of social network. It’s different because it would require a lot more effort to use than the traditional social network style of interaction, but is advantages because it would stimulate actual human interaction. The disadvantage of this network is that people are way too lazy for it to ever actually exist. Basically, it would be thousands of /b/ boards localized to each area of the world on the county level or whatever the equivalent is in other countries.

To get an account with this network, you would have to visit the office in your region that had the actual servers containing the network’s data on that region. You would fill out a bit of paperwork and answer a few questions for the employees there then get a card and a username and password you could use to access your account from home. Log in and begin posting threads with your friends. Literally anything can go in these threads. Links, videos, pictures, text, audio, files, literally anything you can think of. You can have an amazing internet conversation utilizing all aspects of web browsing experience at the same time as networking.

  Now the thing is, logging in only allows you to post threads on a big board with hundreds or thousands of other, completely anonymous people posting threads alongside you. You’ve got no way to know who the hell you’re talking to so it’s just a confusing mess of pointless conversations. The solution is something like telephone numbers. Friends can get together and create unique letter/number combination to be stored is the cards and to place in the titles of threads to alert other friends who might be conversing in a particular thread. Writing these combinations down would be essential for those with poor memory. This part stimulates the mini notebook and writing implement trade.

 Now this has been setup so that you can only network with people in your immediate area. This means that in order to keep in contact with people outside of your region, you must got and sign up for an account at the server office in your friend’s region. In order to register in this region, you would have to have your friend present. You swipe your card  a card and now you both know where the other lives and have had to spend a bit of time and money together. That’s the social part of the network.

 Now library cards are free, but they do occasionally expire. Registration for this network would expire at periods ranging from days to lifetimes depending of the type of friendship the two people shared. So now you can contact friends, but have to visit them every so often to maintain contact within the network. Renewing your account in each region would be easy. You would simply have to visit your friend and go to the regional server place and both swipe your cards at a kiosk outside the regional server office. This fulfils the social obligations of the network.

 Businesses will quickly warm up to the idea of hosting the kiosk service in their stores and probably have some kind of promotional tie in with the machine, discounts or some kind of frequent buyer thing. I wouldn’t know, I’m not a business owner and have no idea how promotional things work, but the store also gets an account that would be able to send ads to a thread you use regularly. This part is about extremely well targeted marketing.

 This whole thing has been set up so you cannot talk to people on the internet who you have never met in real life. It has human interaction and computers. Not only that but it is completely free communication on the internet. No one you don’t know can interrupt your communications and anything you don’t want to see on your network will not be seen. This makes people content with the network.

 So there it is; a new kind of social network. It’s extremely implausible to think this social network will ever be created, but it is a whole lot of fun to think about. Perhaps one day, we will stop being in such a hurry to get to the next thing that we will be able to enjoy a system of social networking like this.