Plurk, Twitter, BrightKite, Hellotxt, Ping.fm, FriendFeed et al can they work together?
Conversation vs. Noise
The title might sound like linkbait, picking on some of the new darlings of social networking, but my question is should we be the services using them in combination, flooding the channels with a lot of noise and little chance of conversation.
Tools like Hellotxt and Ping.fm allow you to post to a number of different mircoblogging services like Twitter, Plurk, BrightKite and Tumblr as well update your status on social network sites like FaceBook and MySpace. While I think they might be okay for a quick update of your status on a small number of sites. Posting to a number of services is creating a lot of noise and destroying any chance of a discussion.
The problem, if like me, you are a member of number of theses sites, you could use a tool to post your discussion starter to a number of services, which can fracture any resulting conversation. If for example you post an idea via ping.fm to Plurk, Twitter, BrightKite and Jaiku and it then feeds into your Friendfeed via Twitter and Jakiu, where do your friends reply? Especially if you have a slightly different group of friends on the different networks.
The end result is a fractured discussion which is not likely to become interesting or compeling enough for people to join in, because their are a couple of replies in Twitter, another couple in Plurk and another couple in FriendFeed. If all six replies ended on one services, the chances of more replies and generating a real conversation are more likely.
So what service should I use and when? That is a question I am working through now, so more soon.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
The problem that I have with ping.fm and the like, and in fact a lot of aggregators in general, is that if you follow a person on a number of services, then there’s all of a sudden an incredible amount of noise being generated. Not to pick on @lu_lu in anyway, but the other day I saw the same mini-blog about a flickr photo she posted on Twitter, Plurk, Friendfeed (four times), her RSS feed and then my Flickr contacts feed.
I can see the need for these services, but it’s forcing me to choose one service to use as a consumer/friend, because otherwise I’m filtering out an incredible of noise. And currently, for me at least, it’s looking like it’s going to be twitter that wins.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Jordan that is what I am talking about, the level of noise or echo from a single post. I managed to generate 36 entries in my lifestream on profilatic with 3 posts to ping.fm or hellotxt.
And the big question is where would you comment on @lu_lu#&8217;s photo? Twitter or Flickr and would you miss any discussion carried out on Plurk, FriendFeed etc.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I know … in the end it’s easier not to comment.
Actually, I had a moment’s confusion when I was going to write the previous comment … should I comment here, or on FriendFeed. All too confusing :)
June 14th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I know, I was tempted to remove the standard comment form from this blog. But most people do not have a FriendFeed account. Disqus was an option but I will stick with the old school method for the time being, that is what I expect most of the typical visitors to this blog expect.
June 14th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I think we need an aggregation format that includes two key concepts:
1) Definitive source, and
2) Definitive/monitored comment location.
So, you could post on your blog and feed readers could provide a link back to the blog page for comments. You could post on twitter and other services could flag themselves as “comments not monitored” and link to Twitter. Or, we’ll get a service which purely handles comments. So all other services can ingest the comments from that definitive source and display them in situ; replies go to the comment service (which just has to track a URI and comments to that URI).
I signed up for ping.fm the other day and found myself thinking… “no way am I going to monitor plurk for comments, i’m already watching twitter and pownce and a blog and flickr and livejournal and facebook and.……”
June 15th, 2008 at 12:30 am
[…] up from my previous post on Conversation vs Noise. This is about carrying out discussions, this is not about status updates like “I just had […]
June 27th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Hmmm… So much to unravel.
Search engines solve everything.
:::: One search to unite them all ::::
Perhaps:
1) Design a search for post with “yourname/handle” & reply:ondate.
2) Add-in a way to pull them all down (daily interval,) and there goes.
3) For the visitor, a cookie can remember searches.
Regarding content integrity:
Design a tiered-comment system with expound on post or “sidebar” option.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:43 am
As for the MUCH LARGER picture (beyond Nickcowie.com), think about mimicing real-conversation, as those avoid interference organically.