Yesterday was one of those days where I felt like I'm stranded in two disconnected worlds. On one side, I have people in my RSS and Twitter feeds discussing the dispersion of conversation into the likes of FriendFeed and Disqus. And on the other, I sit through meetings where we discuss how to drive more traffic to our forums. These two discussions have one thing in common: they're about discussion in the live web. But they're utterly disconnected, as if the two groups were utterly unaware of the other's existence.
And perhaps they are. There's a tendency amongst the bleeding edge web people to dismiss older forms of social media, just as people on the other end of the bell curve tend to lump them together in one, undifferentiated mass.
I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that there are three distinct layers of social conversation on the web, and people tend to exist primarily in one of the three. And I need to develop a language for myself to dicuss these ideas, both with the neophiles who chase after the latest and greatest, and with the tentative newcomers who are just getting their heads around these new forms of media.
Here's how I would (tentatively) articulate them:
Here's how I would (tentatively) articulate them:
1. The Closed Space
This is an incredibly hard space to get your head around, except by getting our there and doing it. Services like FriendFeed and Twitter make almost no sense at all unless you're already using them, and are already familiar with the idea of having your conversations in such a non-contained manner.
Closed spaces are where your conversations are as private as you want them to be. Dominated the by the social networks (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace) as well as the network-focused blog platforms (Vox, Livejournal), they are as much communication services as publishing platforms. You choose exactly who you want to publish to - and who you don't. And much of what you publish won't be available at all to the internet as a whole.
They are, in effect, tools masquerading as places.
I use these spaces purely for contacting friends who use them as their main space.
2. The Community Space
This is where conversation on the web began. The video I posted last week highlighted the evolution of these sites from BBSes, to their most recent incarnations as forums. Here, most of what you publish is publicly available, but essentially inwards looking. You may point at other things from a forum post, but the conversation will happen within the forum space. Regulars will go look, but come back to discuss things. The barrier to entry is rather high - you need to register, and that allows you to define yourself within the system, but you don't get the control benefits that are conveyed by the Closed Space. Equally, you don't get the ownership of your content you get in the Distributed Space.
However, there's still a distinct sense of place about them - you go to this place to do this thing. And then you leave. It's a concept that maps well onto the physical world, and so it's easy for the less internet-literate to grasp. And, like a well-occupied local pub, that can create a place that is at once inclusionary (for those already "in") and exclusionary (for those looking to join).
This is where I lived around 10 years ago. Nowadays, I'm, at best, an occasional, utility visitor to these spaces.
3. The Distributed Space
This is what we used to call the blogosphere, and which is in the process of evolving into something else. Conversations which used to happen primarily between blogs are now expanding out into a multiplicity of spaces. Rather than going to a place (or places) on the internet to have your conversation, you follow the conversation stream of the people within your interest groups into whatever services they're using. This is why the effort to open up the social graph - tranferring social network-like relationship data between services - is so important; it facilitates you tracking your community through different conversation streams.
Each person tends to "own" multiple places - their blog, their Twitter account, their Flickr stream. There's now a strong effort to build a meta layer (possibly another onion layer in the making) on top of these distributed places, with efforts like FriendFeed allowing you to aggregate your activity in multiple different places, and watch your friends' activity streams.
Each person tends to "own" multiple places - their blog, their Twitter account, their Flickr stream. There's now a strong effort to build a meta layer (possibly another onion layer in the making) on top of these distributed places, with efforts like FriendFeed allowing you to aggregate your activity in multiple different places, and watch your friends' activity streams.
This is an incredibly hard space to get your head around, except by getting our there and doing it. Services like FriendFeed and Twitter make almost no sense at all unless you're already using them, and are already familiar with the idea of having your conversations in such a non-contained manner.
This is my natural habitat these days.
Conclusion
This is clearly a work in progress, some intial thoughts on how these layers operate. There's some blurring of the lines. Many big blogs' comments, for example, function as Community Spaces, even if the blog is part of a Distributed Space. And I need to do significant thinking about what types of people use the different spaces and for what purposes. But at least it's out of my head and into the blog. :-)
This is clearly a work in progress, some intial thoughts on how these layers operate. There's some blurring of the lines. Many big blogs' comments, for example, function as Community Spaces, even if the blog is part of a Distributed Space. And I need to do significant thinking about what types of people use the different spaces and for what purposes. But at least it's out of my head and into the blog. :-)
June 12, 2008 12:53 AM | Reply
Hi Adam,
I noticed the different levels of "conversation" out on the web, now distributed among a variety of social media/networking services. Yet all these different services don't seem to make for better conversation, but rather a fracturing of conversation. There's so much fracturing that a reporter at CNet didn't know that the idea of "open source journalism" wasn't a novel concept (see my post on it here)
So, it does make me wonder about the significance of online conversation--and it certainly changes the value of things like links and how traffic is achieved.