If you’ve ever spent much time on a cruise ship, you’ll realize that everything there happens at about a 15 degree angle to the rest of the world. There’s unique traditions that quickly become normalized, like the great and honorable tradition of squirting Purell onto your hands at least 10 times a day, because norovirus is a thing on boats, or looking at the floor of the elevators to find out what day of the week it is.
There’s the odd feeling that you’re staying in a comfortable hotel which – well, first of all, which you cannot leave – but also which, every so often, shifts beneath your feet. Not a lot, but enough to make you question whether your last drink of the evening was stronger than expected than, and then to remember that it is 8am and you have not, in fact had a drink in days because it turns out that they are extremely expensive.
And there’s the presence of Twit-arr to share your memes, hashtags and towel animal photos. There’s minimal access to the “real” internet on a ship, so some enterprising souls developed a Twitter-inspired, pirate-themed, micro social network so that people on the boat (and specifically with the cruise group I traveled with) could talk to each other online.
Twit-arr had no access to the broader internet, and in fact was operated solely through the wireless network on the boat, making it possible for people to share within the limited environment of the cruise – with about 1,000 people – knowing that whatever they shared would stay within that group and would not appear online afterward.
In practice, what this meant was that Twit-arr enabled a much broader version of that same connectedness that small groups in close quarters might, but effectively spanning 1,000+ people and an enormous cruise ship.
Because it was tailored to the experience, it could integrate the day’s events schedule and key information about the cruise, and serve as a one-stop platform for learning about the latest happenings and then chatting about them.
Because it was temporary and ephemeral, it allowed for the creation of a spontaneous online community inspired by but not identical to other social tools’ conversations, such as a lack of external “trolls.”
Last year’s SXSW Innovation Award winner, FireChat, tapped into a similar idea – bringing people together in the place and time where they are in a way that doesn’t share content too broadly. (FireChat also has a different technical approach that uses Bluetooth and peering to enable communication when there isn’t wireless or cell service or when they are overloaded – taking the core idea of time-and-place-specific connectedness in a different direction.)
In the internet as a whole, there’s only so much room for additional social networks – the giants of online social such as Facebook have a substantial first-mover advantage from their established user bases, as any number of social networks have shown as they tried to gain traction. Where it does seem like there’s a valuable niche is in micro social, where time, place and customized content bring something totally different – from being connected to the world to being connected to people here, now, sharing this experience together.