*The act of finding something valuable or delightful when you are not looking for it. The image above is a print called "The Dream of Sleep", that I accidentally found while browsing the web. I liked it, and I posted it on my Facebook profile. Some time later, my ex-coworker John Antoniello IM-ed me "you must think that I am crazy, but I just bought that print! I was staring at it for 15 minutes, it is so beautiful. How did you find it on Etsy?? I can never find anything there."
Well, I was not looking for it on Etsy; and moreover, I was not looking for it at all. I was browsing through some design and art blogs, and even I did not go there on purpose -- I kind of just came across them. But if we forget about this for a moment, and look at this situation from John's perspective, this thing completely randomly got into his Facebook feed, and then, completely unexpectedly, it was super-relevant for him: he loved it the instant it saw it although he did not know it existed. (and this is the question from my last post). Pure serendipity.
This made me remember a quote I read somewhere, saying something like 'don't look for art in a museum, look for it at the street, railway station, market ..." Meaning, I guess, in order to find something, you need to be looking for something else. Or somewhere else. Or not looking for anything at all.
So now, there's ton of stuff on the web, and then, there are social networks which connect all that stuff and people with each other. And, potentially, there's enough visibility of this data so we may actually use it for something, well, useful. For example, to increase random and unexpected, yet thoroughly delightful discoveries. Which made me think what kind of network conditions there have to be to allow this kind of serendipity.
Obviously, the network should have a some sort of scale. While it can be argued that the scale of your own network in itself is not a critical condition (it's more what's the size of your friends' networks that counts, in fact), it does help if your network is made up of more people with large networks.
Then, there should be some sort of diversity. The more diverse friends there are in your network, the bigger the chances that you will come across something that you haven't thought before (this one is kinda obvious, too - being among like-minded people makes you, um, like-minded. the same mechanism explains why tastes tend to converge after a while and why popular stuff, are um, popular).
In a way, you've got to fight against diverselessness by purposefully introducing diversity in your network (or in your browsing behavior). Which is where the above quote about searching for art comes in, and also how I tend to behave online. I am a digital strategist but I mostly stay clear from other strategists' blogs (paul, noah, amber, and johanna being exceptions - but then again, none of them really writes strictly about digital marketing), and tend to read stuff on design, art, sociology, of whatever else. Then, I tend to look at stuff that people in my FB network who are designers, art directors, or creative directors post. This is an almost sure guarantee that I will come across something unexpected that I will like. It's like steering off the beaten path.
So then, there are two things (scale+diversity) in combination that may help serendipity. But then comes the question of filtering: if both scale and diversity become too big they by default become counter-productive. Simply, there's going to be too much noise, and also we can't see/read/listen to everything, no matter how interesting. The world is infinitely complex, and there's a ton of stuff going on. We need some sort of filter.
And there's a twist. Scale/diversity combo obviously is not the solution in itself. That is, it's not a solution if we think about it only in social networking terms. It has very limited benefits there (yes, John may have found something he liked in his feed, but how much information he gets there on a daily basis that he does not like?). There needs to be some relation to content; and here's where Facebook Connect comes in. But don't be fooled; the word "connect" in Facebook Connect in fact means "filtering" :) At least, it should be understood like that. Fun stuff can happen.
It works both ways: a) you can start from content: for example, you are somewhere and you see who else's there (those people can be your friends or not), and then you can look up what other stuff they are interested in (this both filters stuff and increases serendipity). Or, b) you can start from people: you choose to see stuff that only certain of your friends are seeing/liked/bookmarked/etc (also filters stuff and increases serendipity). Anyway, it's all about using social connections outside the walled garden of a social network. I think.
