The current development of social networking tools focuses on those people you already know (unless you happen to venture off into the wild blue, looking for random people to meet on MySpace), and most sites focus on a certain subset of the people you encounter in your life. A few of them strive to connect you to people you do not know but should know because of common interests or goals, but few of these intersect the “you know” and the “you should know” groups of people on any of the social networks

Facebook started as a place for your classmates and then grew to include anyone in your life; MySpace is a multi-faceted den of both people and spammers; Hi5 leans to a more high-school level crowd; LinkedIn is for employment or industry networking; 43 Things is for people with the same goals in life; orkut is exclusive and primarily popular in Brazil and India; and Bebo and Friendster are similar to Facebook in social structure, but are not nearly as widely used, in fact Bebo seems to have become a story overnight when the newly structured 2006 Google Zeitgeist claimed it was the most searched for site of the year, and Friendster might have been the the first major network, but is now considered a has-been.

But what about the people you just share the world with, but have never actually ‘encountered’? In the ebb and flow of your everyday life, there are always people around you: coming and going, reading newspapers, walking dogs, eyeing you across the bus, or hard at work as you walk by their desk. These people are very much a part of your life, some even more so than the people who are your ‘friends’ on MySpace. If you commute to work, you might see the some of the same cars on the road every morning, or you might see the same three people at Starbucks each Tuesday on your way into class…these are the people of your mobile network…or your ‘social flow’, as I’m calling it.

It is very possible that the future of social networking is based upon the geographical connections that link one person to another. A similar idea was started by a site called dodgeball.com which has been acquired by Google. It is based on periodically texting your location to dodgeball and then the site texts you back with a friend of your that is in the same general geographical area (or the friend of a friend), so you can meet up at the same restaurant or share a ride, etc. This is the first step, though. This service is based entirely on people you are already connected to (which would make it a good complement to an existing service such as Facebook). But what if you had a way to connect to the people around you as you went through your day?

If you were sitting on a subway and wanted to know the basic information about the person sitting across from you that you have seen every morning on the same subway for the last two years, what if you could just open your phone and browse their profile? Then at the next stop, they get off and after they walk 100 feet away, you are no longer connected and instead there are 45 new people available in your network, because of the oncoming passengers. This process would continue throughout your day: people always coming and going as a part of your social flow. Maybe you would be shocked to find that you encounter some of the same people multiple times a day without realizing it…if you happen across the same person and the gym, your favorite music store, and your favorite restaurant, it may be worthwhile to introduce yourself…thus moving you from the realm of existing online social networks to one where there is no existing service.

Of course, this raises all sorts of privacy issues, like stalking or monitoring…but how many phone come with Bluetooth technology? If your phone is already set up as a discoverable device, anyone else with a cell phone can already detect your phone if it is in range. A mobile network based on your social flow could be regulated so that people fitting a certain criteria could see your information, perhaps with extra privacy settings available. The technology is available and all a ‘social flow’ network requires is the continued public shift to internet-capable devices, and a platform to run upon.

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