Thanks to everyone who came to our Social Animals salon on Wednesday night, where we explored the evolution of social networking online, and how social media is benefiting our organisational skills at the same time as it commodifies our behaviour. We covered everything from the refreshingly foul mouth of Cher Lloyd to the LSD-soaked visions of 1960s techno-hippies, the fluid corporate hierarchies on EVE Online to the unexpected environmental benefits of the virtual economy.

Our guests were Alex Halliday of SocialGO, who explained the trouble in getting the social networking wires crossed between New York’s black lesbian community and Christian army wives; Xi Zou of London Business School, who showed how men are better suited to online conversation than women; and Rich Martell of Floxx, who passionately made the case for location-based networking being the future, and not just by collecting Foursquare badges. We’ll listen back to some of their points and discuss them further on a forthcoming edition of The Future Human Podcast – remember, you can download the first episode now, and we’ll have another one up for you next week.

If you want to read more of Xi Zou’s research, she’s kindly made one of her recent papers available for download (click here to access it). Entitled ‘Culture as Common Sense: Perceived Consensus vs Personal Beliefs as Mechanisms of Cultural Influence’, it explores how our network of peers, and their collectively held beliefs, affects our own behaviour and perception of cultural norms.  It’s fascinating stuff and well worth a read for anyone interested in reading deeply into how we socially interact.

And as promised, here’s a collection of the most lucid and probing tweets from our Twitterfall last night. Thanks to everyone who proffered their thoughts. We’ll be back next month with Liquid City, an exploration into the conditions needed to engineer an innovation capital – all the info and tickets will go live on Monday. Hopefully see you then!