Just to give an unrelated update to my earlier Places of Technology-Enhanced Social Encounters article, these are among the things I’ve seen people doing at same café:

• Cutting out and glueing together an art portfolio from exhibition photographs (amazing art btw)
• Writing a grant proposal in the field of experimental modern dance choreography (topic: attention and chrystal meth)
• Screening and cutting digital video with a digicam and a PowerBook
• Writing a diploma thesis on music software in an artificial intelligence context
• Job interviews (several)
• Magazine interviews (at least once)
• Cutting a finished piece of electronic music (”Das wird wahrscheinlich ne Maxi”).
• …

And, of course, lots of people working on websites and doing other work-related stuff they’ve been doing at cafés for centuries. Like, say, homework.

(Another thing I noticed: There’s a 50% laptop ratio among visitors at most times, but that doesn’t mean that people stop chatting with strangers. Maybe even to the contrary.)

While watching the progress of masterpiece cleaners‘ new wireless network for the café St. Oberholz in Berlin you can’t help but notice the potential: using technology to create and enhance existing social spaces.

St. Oberholz is a beautiful café in Berlin Mitte, and if you’ve been there recently you’ll have noticed the large amount of laptop users. The café is one of the few places in the area with free wifi, and lots of places to sit. And they just got a new wifi network, hand-crafted by a couple of enterprising artists and technology activists.

I recently talked to smallcaps of masterpiece cleaners, and he tells me they are now trying to create a social marketplace within this technical space — the café’s owner is a little resistant, but I’m sure he’ll cave in as soon as he realizes the potential.

It might sound like a paradox: isn’t this just like the old joke, people silently sitting next to each other, staring on their laptop screens, talking to each other via instant messenger?

But it can be more than that. It has the potential to establish other types of connections, other relationships.

It never has been so easy to ask all of a café’s visitors, present or not: “Hey, where are tonight’s cool parties?!”

Or as Clay Shirky put it succinctly in an article about the value of social software:

[…] there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.