The Mindful Duck of Gosocial

I understand Meetup, GoSocial, Facebook Events and other event based social networks. The one that I don’t understand is GoSocial. It’s a social event network that has visibility on Facebook but you can’t comment, and chat rooms for Geneva, Lausanne and other places.

Instead of creating an event where everything is visible with ease, as with Glocals, Meetup.com, Facebook events and other social networks it is a pig’s breakfast of one chatroom per event, and a list that is manually updated for participation that is only visible when you’re already included within the chat when it’s updated.

There are several problems with this. The first is that to join an event you need to react instantly and say “I want to be on the list” before it is full and you are on the “waiting list”. The second problem is that all numbers are visible in each chat, along with profile images, for those that have them. In the GDPR age this needs to be fixed by Whatsapp.

The social networks are controlled centrally by the admins. They require a komoot file of the proposed walk, and the details. They then create the chat room and the event “organiser” then takes care of the actual event.

With most activity sites you look and you see that there are a certain number of spots, and a certain number of people signed up. If it’s full you ignore it, but if space is available then you sign up and join in.

With GoSocial you see the link, you see the number of people in the chat, but you don’t see the list of participants until it is too late. You’re now in a chat where you’re number 55 of 25 possible participants. The likelihood of participating is now close to zero.

And Finally

The concept of GoSocial is interesting but it doesn’t scale well. It’s great when you have a chat with 70 people discussing what they’re doing but when you have 980 people in one group, and over a thousand in the second, it doesn’t make sense to use whatsapp, because whatsapp is not designed for this type of use yet.

Facebook, and Whatsapp could add Events as a feature within Whatsapp and then concepts such as GoSocial, on Whatsapp, at the scale they’re at, makes sense.