Using several cafes for different purposes

As the contacts included in a cafe owner's cafe will be there as a result of painstakingly establishing a relationship with each of them, it may seem to be a poor strategy that can dispense with contacts in such a cavalier fashion whenever a more favourable person comes along. But, in fact, they are not dispensed with at all, they are simply moved to another of the cafe owner's cafes – one that covers a different category of relationship.

Remembering that a virtual cafe is just a conceptual device for mentally organising personal communications, there is no reason why a person shouldn't have more than one cafe. Just as people can have one set of friend's for social reason's , another set for a hobby or sporting interest and yet another for business purposes, so a person can have more than one cafe to separate various categories of communication. This is illustrated in figure 8.3.

The advantage of working in a virtual world is that you don't have to pigeonhole contacts into any single area of activity. Any contact can be assigned to more than one area of interest. In this cafe metaphor this would mean a cafe owner could assign a contact to more than one cafe. In each cafe, this could be extended even further: to assign a contact to sit at more than one table.

A bricks and mortar world example, of an individual contact who might be placed in more than one category, is when a business colleague is also a social friend or a member of a local sports club. In the different environment there might be totally different relationships. For example, the boss at work may be a player in the local football team where an employee is the team captain. In the two physically and conceptually different settings, there would be a reversal of roles - but this is likely to seem quite natural and acceptable to both parties.

In the environment of the Internet, there are no physical distinctions between different communication environments. This can greatly confuse and interfere with personal Internet relationships, especially where a contact relationship is on several different levels. The simple expedient of dividing contacts into separate conceptual areas – where a single contact can be assigned to more than one area – can greatly improve the efficiency of communication.

Using the concept of cafes to divide personal contacts into different categories is typically characteristic of an object oriented strategy. In each cafe there is a different focus and there is no intermixing of the separate cafe domains. In fact, this principle is not particularly novel because our brain thinks like this anyway. We can instinctively divide our various interests and contacts into various logical groupings and keep them apart.

Unfortunately though, our brain hasn't evolved to deal with the large number of situations and contacts that become available to everyone in the communication environment of the Internet. This is why we need to have computer assistance and conceptual metaphors like the cafe to help us overcome the complexity that can rapidly escalate.

By using a computer to aid mental processing, many different contacts and activities can be arranged in discreet groupings on a screen. This is far more convenient than trying to keep all the relationships and the relative activities in your head and trying to juggle them around in different combinations that have to be remembered – especially where any particular contact or activity might appear in more then one grouping.

With this idea in mind, we can now look at a special kind of conceptual cafe: the kind used to probe and explore the possibilities of creating an e-business from a sea of opportunities.