A project that wasn’t on my last from earlier in the week is the idea that was going to go on inappropriatetouching.com, which I registered back in September.
The idea was derived from Paul Wilson‘s idea for a web site to resolve beer debts. You know how you post to Twitter going ‘Argh, Thing X doesn’t work! Can anyone help?’ and then someone saves the day and you say you’ll owe them a beer? Most of the time the person you owe beer to is in some far-off strange place (like America) so actually purchasing them a beer is difficult. But maybe they owe beer to someone who lives near you, and by following the chain of beer-debts you can find someone who you actually can buy a pint for.
It’s a nice idea, and I hope they actually make it some time.
My less nice variant was like that, but for hugs. You may also have noticed how people are unhappy, or something bad happens in their life, and across the internet people send *hugs*. Now, it’s nice to be in someone’s thoughts, and it definitely does help to send people ‘virtual hugs’ like this – it helps to remind people that they’re not alone and that they have friends they can turn to for support. So why not do the same thing, to enable actual physical human contact, to trade ‘owed’ hugs?
Because unlike beer, hugs are not transitive. A beer from one person tastes as good as a beer from someone else, but close personal contact isn’t the same at all. I personally dislike hugs from people other than my wife, even if they’re close friends, and even less twitchy people are unlikely to want hugs off total randoms.
It would, in fact, be inappropriate touching.
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Yeah, I’m not really a touchy feel kind of person, except with my wife & kids. Sometimes though there are moments in my work where a quick hug may make a difference and I feel very uncomfortable with that, difficult to determine the appropriateness of physical intimacy in such charged situations.
Posted 09 Jan 2012 at 11:17 am ¶How about Flattr for that sort of karma debt? Possible to flattr any Twitter account, even if they’re not signed up just yet.
Posted 30 Jan 2012 at 6:53 pm ¶Well, part of the ‘beer debt’ thing is the implied social aspect – even if you walk the graph of beer debt and find someone local, it still has that social aspect since you’ll need to meet them for the beers.
Flattr’s still a bit too new and unusual to step in there, I think, plus there’s an aspect of almost assigning a cash value to the help which is always going to be far less than the actual commercial value of any help you get. A beer is a repayment among friends, but a micropayment is a bit… off?
Don’t get me wrong about Flattr in general – I think there’s definite uses for it, it would just be a bit weird here.
Posted 30 Jan 2012 at 7:00 pm ¶Good points, sure it’s not everything for all things.
Wondering if there’s a way to make it relevant in such knowledge/karma exchange?
Posted 30 Jan 2012 at 7:09 pm ¶I think it would need to be something separated from money, which would put it in direct conflict with what appears to be Flattr’s main base right now.
An entirely meaningless ‘kudos’/points system could maybe work, but I don’t think it would really take off. The beer exchange has novelty value, plus obviously has beer.
Posted 30 Jan 2012 at 8:03 pm ¶Post a Comment