Scobleizer - Latest Comments in The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

zareste — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:53:26 -0000

It's tough. I had a system going that I called 'Zareste's Grid' and it had some popularity during its short run. It was a Flash program with a huge 2d board where anyone can post pictures, and they could group pictures by similarity. (as opposed to choosing categories) It worked very well, giving people a lot of freedom with very little corruption. And the 'comments' were merely a chat box in the corner that could be turned off

I wonder if this 'sort by space' idea could apply to forums. My next project was going to be a 'message tower' in which people could place new messages near similar ones on a giant list of messages, so we could have all the messages in the world and still be able to find and create them spacially.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Christina Tierney — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:08:23 -0000

Bravo! I sure hope Twitter doe'nt go down the "loss of control over my conversations" road. If I can't craft my experience without intrusion...for the almighty $$...then I'll be gone. GREAT POST! Thanks for sharing.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

$509206 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:24:54 -0000

If you think the problem in general is bad enough, look at this:
http://www.os2site.com/sw/m...

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

debelzie — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:32:29 -0000

I agree that it matters what a person's intent is when choosing a system. Twitter is my favorite as well, but I think some people like FF for tracking their own personal learning. Facebook I find is more for close family and friends.

The NY Times has an article today that is relevant to the conversation. http://www.nytimes.com/2009... Geolocation is soon to be added to Twitter and may help filter some messages by context. The article also mentioned the open-source project Ushahidi. The software has text messages mapped by time and location.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Susan — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:29:14 -0000

For me, Facebook is very much something that is almost entirely for fun. Twitter is where I learn things about technology, my field, helpful tools, some good news stories, new blogs etc. I don't spend time on Facebook expecting to learn anything outside of what is going on in people's personal lives.

But that is also why my Twitter is almost entirely people I don't know face to face, while on Facebook I pretty much consider everyone I have on my list to be a friend in the face to face.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Gui Ambros — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:23:44 -0000

Best comment indeed. And great post, btw. One of the best I ever read from you, Robert.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Tim Maly — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:33:43 -0000

I wish that Twitter stole the "hide posts like this" feature from FF and Facebook and let me hide all the Fourquare/Mafia Wars or whatever tweets without blocking the person utterly.

But for now, ruthlessly unfollowing people whose noise to signal ratio has climbed too high has helped me keep Twitter excellent.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Tim Maly — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:24:34 -0000

I think that "waiting until X isn't cool anymore" is a really valuable strategy. I'm barely logging into Facebook these days because it's so noisy, but my old LiveJournal (yes, yes, I know) has begun a resurgence of relevance for me - the only people left happen to be good friends and so it's calmed down to a gem of highly interesting (to me) content.

I'm nervous about Twitter - at the moment it's a really great source of new ideas and great connections, but as more and more features get tacked on I wonder if what made it special will dilute it. I mean, they are one or two badly designed features away from accidentally turning Twitter into a forum and importing all of those problems that Robert lists. I mean, trending topics became a useless morass of noise months ago. The new re-tweet feature, if done badly, will be very, very bad.

Meanwhile, IRC has become a forgotten near-dead communication tool, but those of us still using it, like it just fine.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Henry Davis — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:27:57 -0000

Thank you for encapsulating my experience so well. I remember all the services you mention...even tried my own forum...for high school kids..what was I thinking?

I think you or spot on rergarding Twitter. Lists have turned my internet activities rightside up again.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Mark Essel — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:06:07 -0000

I brought this up while in wave a few weeks ago. How do we keep the good stuff and skip the not so good stuff?

First off, any service that lets me choose is great. Let the social pipeline be the sum of all the noise and all the signal. Then let each user artistically craft their own input stream from the flood.

User curated communities are pretty common now (HackerNews, reddit, friendfeed). Personalized views of a flood of data, not so much.

I rarely see anything I don't want to on my super human filters list on friendfeed. It's a group with a dozen or so people and I'm always happy to check it out.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

vinnie — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:14:03 -0000

I agree with Aaron, if when deleting an account, friendfeed deletes all the comments that are associated with it, your problem is with friendfeed.

One could approach the argument differently to say that you should ask friendfeed to provide a second copy of all your comments somewhere so that they still 'exist' for you.

---
Scoble, to the larger point you make in your article, it is well put on the noise factor, though I think the flaws/problems on other mediums definitely have an opportunity for smart people to improve the experience.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Chris Heath — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:51:47 -0000

You're exactly right. Photo tagging should be opt-in not opt-out.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Dan Brickley — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:00:23 -0000

Wow, you really blocked someone for choosing a different Web site? I'm surprised, you don't come across as so hotheaded. Kudos for apologising at least.

The only thing we all need to choose is the Web. If it doesn't work well enough, we'll have to improve it...

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Rahul Aggarwal — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:05:59 -0000

@Scobleizer What do you think about bringing more and more conversation to the blog? Integrate your photos, videos, tweets, bookmarks etc., from other services in your blog and let your readers read and comment? Your blog becomes the hub of your digital activity. The community is that of your readers. You can moderate the comments. Its relatively noise free. If you could organize the external content flexibly in your blog you could do more with this..

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

dj adelaide — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:11:07 -0000

if i was having dinner with steve jobs and 5,000 of his friends, i would like to think that steve jobs has some very cool friends who are worth knowing, i suppose that is why facebook is so great for marketing and social proof but i do find it annoying when people upload a photo that has nothing to do with me and then tag me in it, they should really set it up so that the person being tagged approves before it is displayed publicly, i know that it's possible to remove a tag afterwards but really, it should be an opt-in not an opt-out

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Nathan Vingoe — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:54:39 -0000

I see what you are saying, I agree with what you are saying, but for the majority of the users that follow you, it explains your actions perfectly, but doesn't apply to the majority of US..

You summed it up with

"As long as you only have your really close personal friends in Facebook, this is NOT a problem at all."

Which for the mear mortal out there, is usually all we have!! even with my extended network from the tech startup scene, I do not create enough noise on any medium!

This is a Blog entry for the special followers you have/ and information explaining what and why you do things for for the rest of us.!

Don't get me wrong, keep it up. Its of interest, its informative, and it covers real issues in my scene of interest.

on a side note! you mentioned the "list of people who have started companies" and still I havn't made it onto the list.. I know my pitch to you in cambridge was short, and while you were on the way to a pub!! but a founder I am!

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Jay Cuthrell — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:23:20 -0000

Really interesting read actually.

You'll recall that Facebook already saw the "delete" scenario and attempted to prevent it before the backlash you outline (Feb 2009). Yeah. That went well.

This highlights two things: 1) perception 2) prevention

Perception of the meta, the commentary, the extras, the interaction, the flow, the dare I say.... wave. Who owns the flow? If you added a brick to the wall, does it become your wall? Pick any flawed analogy and start taking notes.

Prevention of the orphaned meta commentary becoming orphaned or all derivatives or resultant items surrounding some corpus of unique content (assuming no edits) or the GUID that pins all things back together.... this is the folly of our software development decisions. Again, playback, and control of the everliving asset with full revision control might be the wave people want but don't know it yet... or might change their minds.

I've been around on Slashdot and Livejournal enough to see this play out a few times. Here's the thing... you don't see Slashdot and Livejournal come up a lot these days? Why? They are the BBS of their times... there is always going to be another one.

What we as users/members/etc of any such BBS must always endure? The learning curve of the software developers that are either just starting or have stolen all the best ideas or refined them.

The nuclear option is to "delete" and it is as old as any angsty teen saying they won't go somewhere or leave their room to interact with others. Would you deny this option?

The best elements of LiveJournal, Slashdot, Digg, DISQUS, and the publishing ease of FriendFeed and Twitter might collapse into something one day... and it seems that Facebook is about trying to get there. Maybe.

This is what happens when you force kids to read The Fountainhead and "pick sides".

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Cedric — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:11:54 -0000

Not yet :-)

Let's see in six months from now (but I'm betting the smart folks at Twitter will have found a better way to solve this problem).

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Andrew Ducker — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:49:14 -0000

Well, they did invent OpenID :->

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

talonlardner — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:29:20 -0000

Very interesting notes, though as a "Normal" person, I often find it rather hard due to a limited social circle to get enough people I know well to fully make use of stuff like FriendFeed and Twitter. I worry that such a issue such as the Chatroom problem may swing too far in the other direction, creating near-impenetrable niches and circles that leave newcomers completely out to dry, and echo chambers increasing dramatically.

I'm sure I am wrong, though, and that this won't happen. It is hard to see how the flow of communities will go in the future, there's a lot of ways it can go, I just hope that someone leaves the door open for well-meaning newcomers.

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Alec Perkins — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:16:38 -0000

I forgot to mention that the karma system and friend/foe system on Slashdot also help users choose which people they want to read comments by, call it "soft" following/blocking. If you like someone's comments consistently, you can set them as a friend and give them (in your eyes) automatic moderation up so you are more likely to see what they say. Likewise for someone you don't want to see, you can set their starting point lower. Karma does the same thing, but bases the starting point on moderation of past comments.

Disqus brings some reputation to the system, and does let you follow people's comments, but it doesn't seem to have much impact on the visibility of comments at the source. (I haven't used Disqus as a publisher so I don't know all of its features.) Maybe Disqus, or something like it, is the place for a site-spanning slash moderation system that gives that power of crowds to sites that don't otherwise have the necessary traffic? Just a thought. Visibility could even be based on the average reputation, perhaps excluding outliers so "heavy hitters" don't completely overshadow others. And now I'm rambling...

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Andrea Contino — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:51:09 -0000

Well, as you wrote on the post if you watch things this way could be elitist, as someone pointed out below you don't have 100% of tweets granted with value. But as you teach me, the best part is in the art of the "Answer the correct Following" :-)

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Scobleizer — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:47:41 -0000

Good point about Slashdot!

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Scobleizer — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:47:06 -0000

Google Wave takes the Forum Problem and makes it 10x worse. For me Twitter is it, maybe with some RSS aggregator (but one stripped down so it loads fast, Google Reader can't deal with being a social network -- my instance takes more than a minute to startup).

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Scobleizer — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:46:09 -0000

Good point, best on this thread, I think.