I’m at a Supernova panel called Liquid Conversations that is generally about the migration of comments and participants away from the blog and to other venues, like Seesmic, CoComment, Twitter, FriendFeed , Disqus. It started out as “Who Owns My Comments 101″ and then went in some other interesting directions.
Dave McClure moderated the panel. Social media A-Listers Loic LeMeur (Seesmic), Matt Colebourne (CoComment), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), and David Sifry (OffBeat Guides previously Technorati).
1. Fragmentation is our friend, not our enemy
So far, the most interesting example was given by Bret Taylor , founder of FriendFeed. When Barack Obama gained the delegates needed for the Democratic candidates, 1000s of conversations about the nomination cropped up on FriendFeed. But because the distribution of these discussions were fragmented across many different posts and shared items, they became more:
- semi-private or at least opt-in
- more intimate
- more in depth or meaningful
- anchored by more shared context or at least a real identity
These became more useful than “people yelling at each other” in the comments section of the NewYorkTimes website.
Bret called this the “power of distributed conversation” and is a very subtle point that helps explain why Twitter and FriendFeed have been so useful as a selective and personalized information filter for people.
Implications for designers of social applications: Fragmentation helps people come up with a much more personalized set of conversations, and insures that they don’t get drowned out by the loudest and most common news and information that floods all channels. Don’t make it TOO easy to find people, and don’t make it TOO easy to find the most popular feeds. Create space for a more idiosyncratic, personal space.
2. Soon we will have the rise of the celebrity commenter and comment DJ artist
According to Matt Colebourne of CoComment, just as we had the rise of celebrity bloggers, we will in the future have celebrity commenters or as Dave McClure sez, “comment DJ artist.”
My first reaction was “no!” Its hard to “shape” the conversation without long-form written content. But then I thought about examples where “celebrity commenters” or “DJ artists” already exist:
- Wikipedia
- Wikihow
- Twitter
- FriendFeed
- Forums and BBS
- Facebook
Personal reputation can be built on different platforms. But reputation requires a long-term interaction through that medium with a community around a specific topic or interest. All the more reason to tie your username and identity in one system to another.
3. Nirvana of universal flow between one system to another is not a standards or business issue but “impedence mismatch between one service vs. another”
Several people brought up the issue of sharing information back and forth. Bret Taylor gave the simple example: “if you are posting a reply from FriendFeed to Twitter what happens to the 140 character limit?” Do we split it into two Tweets?
Aside from basic bookmarking, its just as likely that these platforms will actually diverge rather than converge in order to become differentiated participation platforms. So an “impedence mismatch” happens when objects to be shared are in different forms in different systems.
This seems like a reasonable explanation for why it will take time for systems to be interoperable. I personally don’t have any real interest in following the progress of standards efforts, many of which are likely doomed to failure.
Other Supernova2008 coverage
Summize search for Supernova OR Supernova2008, TechCrunch, NextWeb, KennethCarter, DNWallace, Sanford Dickert
