A VC - Latest Comments in Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

tweetip — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:42:49 -0000

justin ~ when twitter scales to 100M users, they not only have a business, we have a new way to communicate in realtime. not important to everyone, but many companies you will never hear of are building apps needing quick instant broadcast capabilities. the point lost (we think) is twitter is creating a pipe of liquidity, where others pay a tap fee.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Aneel — Sat, 31 May 2008 14:46:54 -0000

If these free services go two-way.. and give up those eyeballs, don't they shut off a possible monetization avenue (via advertising) because they cease to become a destination of any kind?

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Yohan Yukiya 사요한 謝雪矢 — Sat, 31 May 2008 06:22:33 -0000

Finally got a time to blog my thoughts and ideas -> Towards One Web Community ^_^

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Chris Yeh — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:46:27 -0000

Caveat: I am not a computer scientist, and am probably way off base. That being said...

Why couldn't we have a system where anyone who creates original content tags that content with a unique token or GUID, which aggregators and others can then pick up and incorporate, wherever they publish the content?

Then the primary content creation systems (WordPress, TypePad, etc.) would build in aggregator trackbacks to copy the comments back to the original location.

It would require independent adoption on the part of a lot of different parties, and it would be imperfect, but at least there would be one place to go to see all the conversations.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

qwang — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:17:11 -0000

I will add that friendfeed comment threads are more intimate. they are exclusive between me and my buddies and I care much more about what they have to say. On a 100+ long thread, I don't really want to read every single comment. Perhaps a cool feature would be:

"5 of your friends have commented on this thread: [friend a] [friend b]....." with anchor links to their comments.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

qwang — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:13:40 -0000

I'd imagine that the "perfect end state" would be aggregators pulling comments out of feeds and writing new comments using some kind of universal API, making the original comment thread the most authoritative. Neither of these (pulling feeds, writing-in comments externally) are very difficult tasks technically, it's really a matter of getting compliance from aggregators.

I find "search and crawl" solution rather messy, and is particularly unfeasible when much of this content is only accessible from behind a login.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

jodyreale — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:09:57 -0000

Social networks becoming more social among themselves? That would be like cobbler's children wearing shoes. Interesting.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

fredwilson — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:40:05 -0000

indeed

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

fredwilson — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:33:04 -0000

Serendipity leads to good stuff

I totally agree

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

fredwilson — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:07:04 -0000

³There were all kinds of vibrant conversations going on, only I didn't know
about them.²

I am going to reblog that thought on fredwilson.vc

That's the point

fred

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Toufique — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:47:26 -0000

Alex took the words out of my mouth. NxM integration is not a scalable solution. We need something better.

I'll try to chime in from the standpoint of someone who's been trying to tackle this problem. I run a social web discovery start-up. We aggregate user-generated relevance data (tags, votes, ratings, trackbacks, comments, links & eventually clickstreams) to help people discover related content. The more and more we used Youlicit, the more we wanted to comment and converse about our discoveries. So we looked into building a commenting system. In our usual spirit of "not reinventing the wheel" (read "laziness"), we figured it would be easier just to build something that would simply aggregate existing discussions and allow us to participate in them. Definitely much easier said than done, but here are our thoughts...

Web conversations aren't like one long sheet of paper. In comp sci speak, they're more like a distributed tree. Clearly, you can't contain them in one centralized place, but you can traverse through them as a single, but distributed, model (think IP addresses, LDAP, etc) as long as the links are created using a trackback-like mechanism as Alex Sitora & Ian Kennedy suggested. Secondly, you need to be able to drill-down into subnodes and make them computationally tractable, i.e. know what people are saying on those offshoot conversations. This is easily solved if the trackback contains a link to an RSS/Atom feed of the comment threads. Thirdly, you need to be able append nodes to the tree. This is easily solved with a simple REST API that allows you to post a comment w/o actually being on the site. I think what we'll need is a "Trackback 2.0" standard w/ three main requirements:
1) Tree discovery & traversal - Trackbacks
2) Computationally tractable drill-down - RSS/Atom
3) Append nodes (comments) - REST

All of the technologies that are needed to make this happen already exist for the most part. So why isn't this happening yet? Well, it's a very new problem, but a large emerging and one (the kind that makes us entrepreneurs go yummy in our tummies). But the only way these things get done is if a few players collaborate and implement it. Standardization comes later. So if anyone else is working on this problem and has some thoughts to share, I'm all ears. Drop me a line, toufique at youlicit.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Chris Brogan... — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:12:31 -0000

Because of this post, I dove back into FriendFeed to see who'd said what about my stuff. I felt sad. There were all kinds of vibrant conversations going on, only I didn't know about them.

One part of the currency I crave from doing a blog is that conversation, especially on my blog, where I spend lots of effort building the posts to be conversation starters, not just fully formed ideas.

I'm with you, Fred. I want it to go both ways.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

dappelbaum — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:53:03 -0000

Excellent point - its definitely time for aggregation to work two-way. My belief is that as the number of roles and systems in the social networking application universe increase, the value of any given system could decrease from simple dilution if these sorts of improvements don't happen. What if services expand faster than people can consume them? Bloggers and savvy internet users will try anything if its seems trendy or likely to help their revenues, but its staying power (and ultimately, the capacity to be monetized) that matters.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Myrne Stol — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:31:31 -0000

Rather than centralizing everything, I think it would be wonderful to have technology where you can easily search in what different places of the web your post has generated discussion. Just like a Digg counter on each page. I think people are quite proud of their diggs and comments on digg, even if there posts don't hit the front page.

It would be nice to be able to place an uberwidget on a page which would include digg, reddit, friendfeed etc. Not only focussed on sharing, like ShareThis but also on showing the discussion in various places.

I don't the conversation will ever get centralized again.
AideRSS already listens to Twitter for example.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

zachlandes — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:08:34 -0000

Human beings are the same - they are just playing in new sandboxes.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

jackson — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:02:59 -0000

I appreciate you driving some traffic my way.

To those who may decide to visit Savage Distortion:

Beware.........

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Vasudev Ram — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:00:32 -0000

@ianbetteridge (about Summize): +1

As of now they say on their site that they only do it for Twitter (I think) but also that they're going to do it for other services as well (including blogs and reviews - see links below).

And: they have an API !!

http://summize.com/

http://summize.com/about

http://summize.com/api

The API is available via standard Atom and JSON feeds, they say. And tons of languages have JSON support - see here, somewhat down the page:

http://json.org/

And (a couple more ideas):

1) JSON is native to JavaScript, which opens up possibilities of client-side code (in the browser) that can react to clicks by the user (or just parse the page/DOM) and do stuff with the clicked link or other page content, using Summize API

2) Google's GData API's are in Atom format (also RSS), so opens up even more possibilities of mashups integrating the original page + Summize API + GData-API-enabled content.

GData API overview:

http://code.google.com/apis...

Okay, enough ... :)

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Vasudev Ram — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:42:11 -0000

oops - meant "slightly long post" :)

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Vasudev Ram — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:38:53 -0000

I don't have a strong opinion either way about the main thrust of Fred's post, since I just saw it and haven't had a chance to think about it - but then saw Fred's comment just above (the one to which I'm replying) and then realized I agree with this:

>I'd like to see who you talk to stuff about
(I'm guessing that means "talk to about stuff")
> Maybe I want to see if they blog or twitter
> And then follow them
>That's the whole point of social media

+1 :)

Some time ago I observed this about myself:

while surfing the Web, whenever I came across some interesting site / post, I would often examine it a bit carefully (instead of just saving it for later use and moving on), and then look for links - on that site / post - to the author of that site / post, and if they had a link to their main site / blog, would check that out, and if they didn't have a blog (or even if they did), would google their name or other things they'd linked to in the first post, to find out more about the person or those things, and this would quite often lead on to finding other interesting stuff they'd written or other interesting software that they'd worked on/with or developed. So after I observed this, I started doing consciously, more often, and have since seen that it has often led on to more discoveries of interesting stuff ... and have made it a bit of a habit to do that nowadays ...

I have a term I use for this phenomenon - I call it "serendipity leads to good stuff" :) - I'm sure lots of other people have discovered this as well, but just sharing ...

Sorry for the slightly post (I would quote Pascal as my excuse :) - and I guess that what I just wrote means that I do (now) have an opinion on the main topic of the post after all :), i.e. that it'd be good if something could be done about it, whether by piggybacking on trackbacks or some other way.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

spragued — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:23:15 -0000

Bloggers certainly get value from increased exposure that fragmented conversations provide -- it may even make up for the loss of direct value of seeing commentary on their sites. But there is still an issue about brands being subsumed by other brands...

http://www.ratdiary.com/200...

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

mrclark411 — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:51:01 -0000

I can see why you would want it all in one place, but I can also see the benefit of having separate conversations (maybe because of privacy or specific interest [music vs. investing] or to include specific audiences).

I think an answer to this would be to have a groups system with a very open api that allows comments and other meta-data (youtube videos, flickr pictures, etc) to be assigned to a specific group. That way, say using disqus, you could have the conversation all in the same place (the original blog), but it is grouped.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

david cushman — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:33:39 -0000

Fred, we have an issue in so much as the likes of friendfeed aren't only distributing the conversation, they are disrupting it.
But, they are adding value by making more of our metadata available to more people - and it's this intersection that allows communities of purpose to self-form on an adhoc basis. The more we can pull this out of silos and make (as you point out) the instigator the aggregator, the more we'll step towards making us the url.

Nutshell: The reason we go online is to connect with other humans. The reason we share our metadata is to make that process easier. Our metadata asserts who we are. The more widely it is shared the more we can connect with others who share our immediate purpose.

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Raji — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:03:46 -0000

We NEED a aggregator!!

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

BillSeitz — Thu, 29 May 2008 08:28:55 -0000

I'm not sure each individual msg needs to be instantly integrated. Being able to at least pull the threads together for discovery would be a big step forward.

(esp if each of those threads has an RSS feed)

Re: Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out

Ian Betteridge — Thu, 29 May 2008 08:22:50 -0000

Of course, one thing we're all forgetting: At the moment, FriendFeed doesn't even aggregate comments internally. Even if I just reshare an entry, that spins off an entirely new comment thread.