| In the past I've been very isolated because of health issues which kept me in bed for months at a time, and I've thought a lot about how to make friends online. I've come to the following conclusions: 1) You need a common topic of interest to start the spark of friendship, something that keeps you coming back and gives you an excuse to speak to each other and unending content to speak about. 2) You need to force yourself to check up on them daily to weekly about that topic. 3) You need them to be interested in forming a new friendship (it's a lot of work for both parties involved, not everyone cares to extend their circle of friends or to form online friendships). 4) You need chemistry. 5) Things are a lot easier if you belong to a small online community where people know each others. Among these 5 requirements, (2,3,5) are irrelevant to your problem of matching people. Requirement (1) you can provide through hobbies/interests card and clustering somewhat easily with the current system. Requirement (4) I don't know what it is, or what makes it work. With some people it just won't click. I know it's not because of opposite political beliefs, or lack of common interests, because I have friends which are counter-examples for those potential failure cases. I think it has to do with personality, similar thought patterns (not beliefs) or something like that. The categories you mention could be a path towards quantifying that but you'd want them to be soft-indicators because again people with opposite political beliefs, or senses of humour can be great friends. So I don't really know in the end. Have you looked at online dating research? I bet there's some smart people who worked on compatibility indicators for these kind of applications. |