I think the house party analogy is very apt, almost too much. I love house parties precisely for the 'crashing into a new environment' feeling, where you get to meet friends of friends of friends in a relaxed and non-creepy way. Indeed bringing this experience on to the web and making it as cool as Facebook (and the opposite of online dating) would be a killer, sign me up first in line.
The key here is culture, and for now the best way to find people with a culture similar to yours is through friends of friends, which is exactly why house parties are so cool. If a service gets smart enough to find people completely removed from my social circles who do feel like they (should) belong to my social circles, that would be a wonderful use of collective intelligence, machine learning and whatnot. That we could finally have something like this amidst this wave up of big data seems plausible.
The key here is culture, and for now the best way to find people with a culture similar to yours is through friends of friends, which is exactly why house parties are so cool. If a service gets smart enough to find people completely removed from my social circles who do feel like they (should) belong to my social circles, that would be a wonderful use of collective intelligence, machine learning and whatnot. That we could finally have something like this amidst this wave up of big data seems plausible.