| Why do we find it so hard to build an insanely great Few To Few communication system? Conversations within a group of like minded people is fundamental to what it means to be human. From the 3-25 people eating together to the couple of hundred people worldwide that share an interest in some obscure form of motorcycle to the local golf club, small groups of people getting together to socialize is very very common. The geek world has tried all these:- - Mailing lists - IRC - Usenet - Skype Public chats - Web Forums (phpBB etc) - Tribes, Orkut Groups, Ecademy Clubs And for various reasons, they've all failed, been discarded or at least haven't reached their potential. Often this is due to poisonous people (The Fuckwad problem) or it's because the technology is too hard (IRC) or too unstandardised (email client threading). But then we get a whole series of technologies that are supposed to be better and are promoted as if they provide a real alternative. So we have:- - Blogging - Actually a monologue, One to Few. - Blog Comments - One to Few and impossible to track across the blogosphere. - Twitter - Another monologue, One To Many. With almost no feedback and response. So here's Danah Boyd talking about Twitter. I'm reading between the lines but Danah seems to be complaining that there's no back channel and Twitter is broadcast only. "The techno-geek users keep telling me that it’s a conversation. ... But i don’t think that either are typically conversations. More often, they are individuals standing on their soap boxes who enjoy people responding to them and may wander around to others soap boxes looking for interesting bits of data." I've thought about and actually written the code to Tweet, whenever I get a new entry in the RSS feeds from last.fm (what am I listening to), my blog (what have I just said), Librarything (what have I started reading), Amazon Wishlist (What do I want), Flickr (What have I just posted). But I've decided not to enable it. Not because I want to be secret, but because I don't want to pollute the Twitter stream with hundreds of posts per day. Meanwhile, we still need a better Few-To-Few conversation medium. |
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[ 20-Mar-07 12:15pm ]
