As the conversation spreads around, how can we follow and participate?
A lot has been made of late about how discussions and conversations have been moving from forums, to blogs, to Twitter, to Facebook, to this site, and that site. The problem is, then, how do you track them all?
I want to be a part of conversations about the topics I am interested in, but I know that I can’t participate in all of them. However I would like to be a part of the ones that relate to me and the things that I’ve written.
Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb has taken a stab at where to find the various conversations and how to try to follow them:
We’ve seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we’ve questioned whether they’re adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to.
The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up? From: The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere - ReadWriteWeb
I’m still not convinced that this is enough. I’m in the same camp as Muhammad Saleem with his backing of SocialThing (I did get an invite–thanks CJ!) I’d like to see the conversations stay where they started. If it starts on Twitter, keep it on Twitter. If it starts on a blog, keep it there. Yes, this might be old school, but you know, I think everyone benefits from this. Comment on a post on FriendFeed? How many of my readers will find that? Heck how will I find it?
One of the features I like about FeedDemon and other smart RSS readers is showing me the comments on a post (or at least that there are comments on the post). Now imagine trying to track that across Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, del.icio.us, Diigo …
Yeah you get the picture. Solution? Maybe connecting the services together? Maybe consolidating the comments? Cocomment didn’t last long (yes, I know it’s still around), but that was a great effort towards this goal. Now the situation has gotten worse…maybe we’ll throw our collective hands up and just go back to commenting only on the blog posts?
Naw, that might just be too easy.
Tags: conversation, RWW, Sarah Perez, Social MediaRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Blogs, Opinion, Social Media
4 opinions for As the conversation spreads around, how can we follow and participate?
Connie Bensen
Mar 22, 2008 at 8:33 am
Hey Tris,
It’s ironic because I just set up http://socialthing.com/ and am trying their beta. What’s really funny is that it shows me all the tweets & facebook updates of my friends - and that’s how I linked to this post.
(so maybe an aggregator is a good thing?)
I’m coming back out to Vic on April 23 - 26, so we’ll have to organize a meet up?
Tris Hussey
Mar 22, 2008 at 11:27 am
Connie, that is the good side to these aggregators like FriendFeed and SocialThing. The downside comes when the comments are left there instead of the source.
Meet up in Vic! Totally! Maybe a photowalk around town?
christophe
Mar 22, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Yes, coComment is still around, and still service a fast increasing number of users ;-)
And yes, we are still helping commenters to track conversations, wherever this happen.
We are also aware of the issue with fragmented conversations and we are working on a solution to help people to cope with this. Any suggestion is welcome of course. But I think one solution could come from being able to define related conversations so your users can easily track all conversations talking about the same initial article. Another approach would be for a site owner to define all services where he reference his post so we can automatically search for conversations on this article and track them along with the post conversation.
Additionally, we provide commenting feature to help our users to have conversations everywhere. Like for example on Tumblr, or on any platform where you can make simple customization to the template.
SocialThing!’s secret sauce isn’t friending, it’s finding
Mar 24, 2008 at 3:32 pm
[…] Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of discussion about FriendFeed vs SocialThing!. My own take, which isn’t all that awe inspiring, but I do fall into the “FriendFeed makes my info overload worse” camp. […]
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