TownSync Daily

The Web’s Future is “Town”

Jan 16, 2009 Live Local, TownSync

We recently read an interesting article written in the BBC called “The web’s future is ‘village.” The article goes into detail, and interviews a man from HP named Bernardo Huberman, about how people are connected to thousands of people online but they really only pay attention to a few of them, “… enough people to fill a village.”

In our case, however, it’s a town. The concept of TownSync was based on the idea that people currently aren’t connecting with others online that are close enough to affect them in the real world. Hyperlocal networking is a way to connect people that matter to you. What’s going on in your area? Who’s new to town? What’s the best place to play pool nearby? These are questions we hope TownSync will help answer for those connecting on the site.

Here are few quotes from the article, and here’s the link, enjoy!

Despite the desire to have the world of information at our fingertips and a social networking page that boasts of hundreds of so-called “friends”, the reality is very different.

Researchers at Hewlett Packard have found that, in truth, we really only bother about a handful of friends and generally visit a small number of websites.

“With Facebook many people boast of having 100, 200 friends but in reality only keep up or track a very few of them.”

On this basis Mr Huberman concludes that we are returning to a time where we maintain close contact with a small number of people – enough people to fill a village.

“Things are starting to become intimate again,” he said. “We went through this explosion, this illusion that the world is at my fingertips and I can reach anyone and everybody. But at the end of the day we notice that we actually interact with very few.”