Conversational fluidity: using the FriendFeed river

Courtesy of Mikipedia

Like so many emerging trends of the last few years, perceptions around ‘conversation’ has changed. Once rooted in the idea that blogs would be the foundation upon which we converse with the world, there has been a real shift.

Much earlier in the year, several of the blogerati noticed a phenomenon well articulated by Stowe Boyd and summarized by Taylor Davidson:

Instead of helping to solve the natural problem of communication that is called “being human”, online communication tools have only added to the complexity. Discontinuous. Fractured. Lack of context. Asynchronous communications scatter across our various inboxes, comments litter the web, incomplete conversations are lost amid the noise. Group conversations evolve, devolve, tune people out as the meanings and topics change, change from private to public to private.

In short, it’s a bit like picking up a bundle of daily newspapers and sifting through to find the commonalities or nuggets that matter to you.

Most of the people I want to reach have little idea let alone desire to connect beyond the blog (or email.) They might know about Facebook but they likely don’t know (or care) about Twitter, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Diigo, SocialMedian and a myriad of other services that are fracturing and splintering our communications. The problem comes, how do you bring it all together when they are being spread in this manner?

Robert Scoble attempts to answer this from the perspective of trying to get smarter in news gathering but the same could be said about any form of conversation where you want the best of what you can find:

Watching 5,000 people tell me the latest news is changing everything about what I think news in the future will look like.

Your friends will bring you the news. Just like here.

Then we’ll talk about it. That’s my comment feed so you can see what I’m talking about.

Then we’ll blog about it, or do our own reporting.

And the cycle will start all over again.

It’s a problem I’ve been mulling for some time and is one of the reasons you can see a FriendFeed box at the end of each post plus a lifestream panel in the right hand sidebar. The difficulty comes in figuring out how to filter the attention streams, keeping a watch and then bringing that to people’s attention at the appropriate time.

Filtering is relatively easy. On FriendFeed for instance, I don’t follow anything like the number of people I do on Twitter. I’ve pared that back to a relatively small number of people who are most influential to me. I could easily add a lot of people who might add to my understanding of the world but then I’d still need to make a hand picked list of those most important to me. I can do that with FriendFeed by creating lists – the equivalent of categories if you like. But am I not recreating the lists of those I filter in email? Where’s the real difference? More important, where’s the advantage because in truth FriendFeed and other services is largely restricted to a tiny subset of people who might add value? That’s something I’m trying to work through right now.

Last weekend, I called up Scoble to get his thoughts on this because while he is a proponent of moving to where the conversation is really taking place i.e. FriendFeed, I was struggling to see how he could possibly manage the tsunami of stuff coming at him – check out his real-time flow to get a sense of what I mean. It turns out he doesn’t actively manage them. Instead, he has selected around 200 people he wants to hear from (most of the time) and dips into the torrent when it is appropriate to do so. That’s fair enough. But I need something more.

Scoble wants to be a news breaker and that directs his approach. In my wee niche I don’t have such issues. Sure, it’s nice to be first out the gate with a story but it is in the analysis that I find the meanings that matter to me. That still requires the assimilation of many sources but it also means parsing through the layers of nuance. That should be familiar to all professionals who want to know where the balance of argument lays such they can proffer the ‘correct’ advice – which we all know is never going to happen. Maybe a close approximation.

Then we have the problem of keeping a watch or paying attention. I don’t think we’re remotely close to getting the right answer. RSS feeds help, filtering does part of the job. But in truth I rely on – wait for it – email alerts because I just don’t have the time to give 100% attention or even 5%.

And then what happens when tastes change or new and powerful voices emerge? I go through the cycle again.

I’m hoping that in 2009, we’ll see technologies emerge that crack this nut and are self evident to the point where it is a no brainer for anyone to pick them up. FriendFeed is a part of the answer today but as I said earlier, only reaches a small subset of people. Even so, many of thosee voices are helpful to my quest for innovation. Whether it remains so in the future is another matter. Hence the title: conversational fluidity. Perhaps some form of alert ticker will do the job?

Of course none of this might matter to many of the professionals that read this stuff but be aware that someone, somewhere is almost certainly talking about you. If they’re not doing that, then they’re certainly talking about issues that matter.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Some interesting thoughts on Twitter and Friendfeed
• Tumblr’s lead dev: “Scoble doesn’t know what he’s talking about”
• I’m not looking for the wisdom of crowds…
• The death of blogging is nowhere near….

Tagged as: conversation, friendfeed, Robert Scoble, social networking, Stowe Boyd, Taylor Davidson, Twitter