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What's missing from the social web? The ability to just hang out and throw back a few. Really. The missing element from the new, social media driven internet is quite ironically the ability to socialize with people directly, rather than mediated through various services online. And why is this important? Because no matter how much we can expand our social lives online, what matters most is our social lives offline.

You see, we all have a need to have friends, people we can hang out with for no reason at all. The story of social networking services has been "we can let you find new friends and have lots of fun with them". But how often is it that said fun gets translated from the internet into real life? After all, a few games on Facebook does not match throwing a few darts at the pub. Or battling it out in paintball. Meeting someone on FriendFeed is not the same as an encounter with an attractive stranger at the local nightclub. What we get online are digital analogues (no joke intended) to the activities we look forward to online, but they aren't really replacements for those activities, no matter how much they seem to be.

I'd love to get to simply hang out with friends and meet strangers in the real world. But I don't get that online. Sure, I get to hang out with people. I get to meet real people. But I never get the same satisfaction, the same thrill, as doing so off of the net.

If you find that for all the interaction and social behaviour you enjoy online, there's still something missing, perhaps you should get off the computer for a while, head out to the bar, and enjoy some real, face-to-face socialization.