F2F Still Matters

Kathy Sierra has a great post today: Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video... and she provides this picture: It shows that while we slowly approach real-time, realistic virtual conversations, it still isn't quite the same thing as being there.

As an aside, I personally question that view. In the long run - 25 years - we will all be walking around with devices that attempt to make in-person as good as doing it via online. Online you will have an incredibly realistic experience (think how good virtual actors are these days - add 3D - presence based audio - first person shooters). And because you are online, you will have access to all sorts of information about the people, what their interests are - it will be easily captured. The challenge will be getting people used to this - hence the 25 years.

But for now, Kathy expresses something quite true:

The point is, face-to-face still matters. And in fact all our globally-connecting-social-networking tools are making face-to-face more, not less desirable. Thanks to the tools y'all are building, we now have more far-flung friends--including people we've never met f2f--than ever before. We now have more people we want to connect with in the human world, often after years of electronic-only contact.

Kathy suggests that we should really be working to:

Get people together in the real world.

I completely agree with her, but I've found it to be really difficult to:

• Meet People within a given Geography Online who share passion around Technology, Start-ups, etc.
• Find avenues to network with these folks.

So, what I've ended up doing is planning our own events (wine tasting) and just inviting people who I know are interesting. We've done one so far, and it's great. Kathy's on the money on this one.