THIS is weird. I did a bit of social networking the other night, but it was a strange, new, modern kind of social networking that I wasn't familiar with. It involved chatting to friends, but we weren't doing the usual SMS, MSN, Bebo, email, Twitter or Facebook. We actually chatted face-skin to face-skin.

At first I didn't know what to do with my fingers and I was actually pretend-typing as I spoke, tapping full-stops at the end of every sentence, and if I got stuck in a dull conversation, repeatedly banging away on Command-ESC Force-Quit.

It happened at a friend's non-digital house, in an external backyard, around a very tastefully spread-sheeted table, and there was a bunch of people there, all happily adding each other to their "friends list" and sharing comments without anyone turning on their privacy settings.

First I got MouthTalking to a very nice woman called Kate:). She was chatting about movies, but I didn't know how to respond facially, so I started pulling emoticon faces to show her how I was feeling. Pretty soon we ran out of things to say, so I pulled a Too-Tired-To-Talk Yawny Face.

Then she gave me a link to a guy sitting beside her, a quiet dude called Oceablue599. He was shy so I decided to talk to him in Twitterish - short messages of no more than 140 characters - but I think he had trouble following the concise wittiness of my conversation, so he eventually forwarded my message on to a daggy bloke called Roland@hotmail down the other side of the table.

Now this guy was a real know-it-all, firing off great slabs of ill-informed blather (probably just cut-and-pasted from Wiki), and I started getting BTT (Bored To Tears), so I said to him BRB (Be Right Back) and walked off.

Look, I had a good time doing this MouthTalking; it was something different to try. But I'm not sure it'll ever replace good old-fashioned online socialising - you know exactly what people are thinking, it's so much more straightforward.

Danny Katz's new book, Big Stories From Little Lunch, is available now.