Culture
An App for Making Friends on the Subway
Playdope connects people whose paths through the city overlap.
When Stanley Milgram identified the "familiar strangers" that pervade city life in 1972, he defined them as people one sees often but never interacts with. Fellow commuters, for instance, or people who share a corner shop. This class of city dweller still exists — recent research suggests an entire community of close encounters out there.
But now, there's a similar class of "familiar strangers" in a new sphere -- online. The friend of a Facebook friend, for instance, or a Twitter follower who happens to live nearby.