A quick history of conversation on the web

Con­ver­sa­tion has been a hot topic on the web recently, with Tech­Crunch, Duncan Riley, Alex van Elsas and Julian Bald­win amongst oth­ers. The main con­cern seems to be that new com­ments solu­tions are tak­ing the con­ver­sa­tion away from the ori­gin­at­ing web page. The oppos­ing view is that con­ver­sa­tion in the real world it is frag­men­ted. With dif­fer­ent people join­ing and leav­ing the con­ver­sa­tion at dif­fer­ent times.

This got me think­ing about my views I expressed in Twit­ter, Plurk and Friend­Feed as dis­cus­sion tools, and my exper­i­ence with con­ver­sa­tion on the web over time. So here is a pot­ted his­tory of my his­tory with con­ver­sa­tion on the web. Note I was a late starter, not start­ing using the web until 1993.

Web 0.5 c1995

Back in the good/bad old days of the web the main place con­ver­sa­tion was hap­pen­ing on was email, either on lists or amongst indi­vidu­als. A web page might spark the con­ver­sa­tion, but the con­ver­sa­tion would usu­ally take place in the rel­at­ive pri­vacy of email, because that was were the com­munity was. Some list archives where open, but not all, and some of the most of the inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion took place between indi­vidu­als and quite often offline.

Not all con­ver­sa­tions, took place in closed envir­on­ment. Back then I use to con­trib­ute to a local music webz­ine, for your new­comers to the web, it was basic­ally a blog pub­lished weekly which had a basic com­ment­ing sys­tem called a guest­book which covered the whole site. I had con­ver­sa­tion with a friend on the guest­book about a review I writ­ten. That even­ing I walked into a bar to see a band and bumped into a couple of other friends. One who said “We where just talk­ing about the dis­cus­sion you where hav­ing on the web­site and …”. Which is a good example of con­ver­sa­tions going well bey­ond the ori­ginal source.

What sur­prised me at the time was the two friends in the bar, were the two most power­ful people in the local music industry at the time (a record com­pany exec and the editor of the local music print mag) and they were inter­ested in a con­ver­sa­tion between two fans. That night I learnt that con­ver­sa­tions in the open online had a much big­ger impact than off­line con­ver­sa­tion and could start con­ver­sa­tion in other places. I had seen the future of the web.

Web 1.0 c2000

While a lot of con­ver­sa­tion was still hap­pen­ing on email and some had switched to IM. For­ums had become pop­u­lar, and more con­ver­sa­tions were hap­pen­ing in this more open envir­on­ment, because com­munit­ies where devel­op­ing around these forums.

This was the start of the cent­ral­isa­tion of com­ments. A web page might spark a con­ver­sa­tion, the dis­cus­sion would take place on one or more for­ums, where there was a com­munity. The prob­lem was that dis­cus­sion were sep­ar­ate from the ori­ginal source and a lack of tools made it dif­fi­cult for the ori­ginal author to find any con­ver­sa­tions they star­ted unless they were mem­bers of the community.

Web 1.5 c2004

With the advent of blogs, con­ver­sa­tions took place on that blog or on a series of blogs as long as there was a com­munity around the blog/s. How­ever, if there was a strong com­munity out­side of the blog, such as a forum you would often find con­ver­sa­tions tak­ing place there.

Web 2.0 c2008

The com­munit­ies are mov­ing on, no longer do people visit blogs to read posts, they use RSS. As people no longer visit blogs, the con­ver­sa­tion now takes place in the com­munity where they are in. Which is now Twit­ter, Friend­Feed and other social net­work services.

The future

As the web evolves and devel­ops, con­ver­sa­tion will always occur in the com­munit­ies. Authors will no longer have the con­ver­sa­tion occur­ring right in front of them on their blog, because the com­munity that exis­ted has moved on. How­ever there are a range of tools for authors to keep track of the con­ver­sa­tions they star­ted (ie sum­mize), unlike the good old days. Still the best way to be part of the con­ver­sa­tion is to be involved in the community.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Just geek, blogging . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.