I have so called “friends” on many so called social sites. And each time I try to have conversations with my friends, those sites tend to gently pat me on my shoulder and remind me that the medium is the message.
I have to conform to the 140 characters that have been kindly offered to me by Twitter. I want to post a message to the thread in Facebook Groups, but I can only reply to a single person’s statement. Conversations on the web seem to be trickier than one would expect.
But what are conversations really about? What are you actually doing when having a conversation with someone face to face at your favorite restaurant? You’re talking about SOMETHING with SOMEONE. So what should actually matter to you on the Web is THE SUBJECT, THE PEOPLE and THE CONTEXT. NOT the platform.
The technology doesn’t really matter. Moreover, the technology should be transparent in the conversational Web. All we should see are PEOPLE we want to talk to, and THINGS we want to talk about, connected by a CONTEXT that shows us how the conversation is unfolding.
Some call this the distributed web, but it’s really not. It’s a lot more than that. And I’ll tell you what it’s not also. It’s not FriendFeed and it’s not LifeStreaming. It’s not about seeing your friends’ tweets and pokes in one place.
The interesting Conversational Web that I’m seeing only shows you what matters, the content and the people. And it lets you interact with both without caring, or even knowing where they come from. You may be talking about golf with a friend and about photography with another. The golf friend might be using a regular forum, or even a newsgroup to contribute to the conversation. The photography friend might be using both a blog, a photo sharing site and an IM service to share his opinions and examples. And you wouldn’t know or care about that. You’d see it all the same. All you would care about would be that you’re having a meaningful conversation in a very rich way.
There are a lot of challenges to using this approach. There’s the authentication and security, that OpenID might take care of. There’s the problem of finding a way of showing meaningful information about someone so you know who you’re talking to in that context. If you’re talking about photography lighting techniques, you might find interesting to know that the person you’re talking to is a professional photographer. But you might not care about that if you’re talking about parenting.
There’s also the problem of making all these services work together so that you can actually interconnect them. And there’s always the problem of providing CONTEXT. There are millions of interesting conversations about photography around the Web. How you find out about them, organize them, get them in front of the user and keep track of the participation across platforms is very, very tricky.
I honestly think it can be done and it must be done. The way the Web is going today, I see a flood of noise grouped by way of some social order (Graph, if you may). People keep to their current communities, limiting themselves to the same group of people that say the same uninteresting things. Some friend everybody, flooding themselves with information that they never intend to process and in the end having lots of shallow interactions.
The Conversational Web can be a great thing for us. But it needs a lot more tweaking if we are to be able to have lots of meaningful conversations, meet lots of new great people that we deeply connect with, all without wasting all our time in the process.
Think about it, please.
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