When we first saw the story of Matt Kulesza, an Australian man who pledged to meet all 1,088 of his Facebook friends for coffee, we were pretty impressed. A chance to catch up with old acquaintances while providing a commentary on how social media allows us to maintain a plethora of tenuous connections while avoiding face-to-face interaction is a pretty cool social experiment. But when we visited Kulesza’s blog, 1000 Coffees, we came away convinced of one thing: His experiment will fail.
Without looking, how many friends do you think Matt met for a cup o’ joe before the story of his social experiment went viral? 500? 100? 50? The answer, a little over the month into the experiment, is 28. A reasonable pace, to be sure, but is the fact that a guy met 2% of his Facebook friends for coffee and blogged about it really all that newsworthy?
And call us skeptics, but where is Kulesza going to find the time and money to get coffee with Facebook acquaintances of his who don’t live in Australia? A quick scroll through his friend list shows friends who live in New York, LA, Japan, France, and numerous other far-flung locales. Sure, he could Kickstart his way around the world — the Internet has been known to fund some pretty ridiculous projects in the past — but unless he strikes while the viral iron is still hot, people will move on to the next funny/offbeat/inspiring Internet Thing Of the Day.
None of this is Kulesza’s fault, of course. His intentions are noble, and if he can somehow scrape the funds together to meet all 1,088 friends, more power to him. He’s already managed to connect with a friend he hadn’t seen since the ’90s, and meet amicably with an ex-girlfriend (which is almost a story in and of itself). But maybe we should wait until Matt has sipped lattes with a couple (hundred) more friends before giving this story any more coverage.
[images via 1000 Coffees]
