The Connection Glass facilitates and enhances meeting compatible people

Computer Mediated Communication is superior to human mediated communication in many aspects. It may lack the tact, appropriateness and guile of a skilled host or facilitator but it significantly increases the size of your usual social or business contact universe and can give you a far greater choice of prospects to mine. On the other hand, there’s no substitute for being there, so you can look your potential business partner, lover or collaborator in the eye and take a good look at who they are – the computer can neither detect or assess the nuances of how we present in person, what we say, how we conduct ourselves, how we dress and ultimately who we are – for that you need a human being. For example, it would be unwise to agree to marry someone over the internet without having met them in person (though no doubt it happens), and you’d be silly to ink a major business deal without having performed due diligence by assuring yourself in person that your partner was capable of keeping their end of the agreement. The handshake still represents a large part of the contractual process.

So how does one effectively introduce the most compatible people making all of the relevant information available in the most convenient way to enable them to make the best informed decisions? If all of these information inputs could be delivered effectively, it would be much easier to meet the right person in a room full of people to help you achieve your goals. Networking could be significantly more empowered and effective for everything from job/employee hunting, finding sale prospects, suitable romantic or sexual partners, building netwoks of friends, community building and almost every other form of human social endeavour would have a lot of time consuming friction removed from the process.

Computers hold great promise in matching us with particularly suitable partners and we’ve written up several such concepts, that range from proximity-based cell phone introduction using bluetooth through to nTag’s smart badges – enabling communication in a virtual world level and in a physical environment. Readers should feel free to suggest other systems worthy of consideration.

Designer Priscilla Bernikowicz began investigating ways of connecting people to build communities as a senior thesis project at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and before too long decided that the most interesting application of compuer mediated communicationwas in connecting people for relationship.

One night on spring break at the House of Blues in Chicago Priscilla observed that it was impossible to talk to people, or even order drinks properly because “you had to yell in your server's or bartender's ear, and speaking to someone new was really impossible.”

Priscilla’s search for suitable technologies and the best features of community building sites saw her look across all forms of computer mediated relationships. “I studied websites like Craigslist and I checked out match.com and sites like that as well as speed dating services.”

“Then I started to go out to clubs and bars and just observe people's behaviors.

“People were not really meeting one another very effectively because the volume of the music makes audio communication too difficult.

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