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17/03/08 Microblogging - Continuing The Conversation
This week I did a 5 piece post series on Microblogging (@Symbolic #Language, Conversational Brilliance, Challenges of the Mainstream, Information Overload, & Channels - Don’t do it.). I’ve taken all the blog comments you posted and have done a recap to try and document the great points made and continue the conversation…
Microblogging systems are being hooked up to other machine channels like LouderVoice, Qik, Flickr, etc. all into one feed. This is like going back to browsing the web instead of aggregating our own choice of feeds. We are already reaching capacity with how much online chatter we can handle. As digital professionals we’re the exception to the rule, imagine people who find computers a hassle to use.
Losing the value of microblog posts not read in real-time is a real problem for Twitter while Jaiku’s threaded conversations handle this easily, the conversation can be consumed in a time-shifted manner.
Just like people already write different blogs for different audiences, people will have different microblogs for different persona’s. This is similar to putting all your professional ‘finance’ content in a ‘finance category’ on your blog. A choice to manage ‘friends as contacts’ instead of ‘themes as content’ would differ how a Twitter Finance would be different than a Twitter Finance channel.
Differences about ‘intent’ were discussed with full flows exposing us to wider surface of interests while on the other side within ‘Finance’ you might actually need a ‘financial tips’ channel for finance, because the ‘intent’ is to use that information to help make trades.
There may be opportunity to build a white-label microblogging platform (a microblogging Ning) and allow 1000 flowers to bloom. See what community styles flourish using this medium. There is potential for a directory of user-generated microblogging short-codes that APIs could plug into e.g. %map:Dublin, %quote:FTSE, %time:Tokyo.
Tools like Jaiku, Pownce and Twitter are very useful as back-channels (especially for events), rather than primary short text channels. For events, channels have the ability to stay dormant until another organiser picks it up and populates it with people interested in contributing to the event flow (the Podcamp channel on Jaiku was used during CreativeCamp in Kilkenny last week). It could be a cluster of people from anywhere in the world and the RSS-powered channel would work elegantly.
Are we looking for the ability to Filter In or Filter Out? The inability to filter out things we find annoying e.g. ‘dropping the kids off at school’ yet hear ‘dropping into Google office in Dublin’ is required. People of different social distances to us may need different social volumes.
Tracking the conversation about your products or services on microblogs is invaluable. What would it take to connect a Siebel ‘Customer Relationship Management (CRM)’ 2.0 system up to the web?
(Image Credit: Its been raining for 4 days now! Builders travel home in the back of their truck hiding under a plastic sheet. Yesterday, by Author.)
Tags: blog, comments, conversation, jaiku, micorblogging
1 Comment
19/03/08 gregory
was just reading about disqus, a comment management system, something like a delicious for comments, and how comments themselves can become blogposts, and visualyzing a blog that blooms like an algae growth…
and microblogging as the same thing….
and thinking of a graphical widget that could show exactly where your are in the fractal-sphere that any one blog could become…
