Beyond Blogs: The Conversation Has Moved Into The Flow

Loic Le Meur is only the most recent person to notice that the conversation online has moved away from the blogs that once seemed the nexus:

[from Loic Le Meur Blog: My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog]

[...]

The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service.

I think that day is done.

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation -- the comments thread on blog posts -- to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social.

Personally, I don't think the genie can be put back in the bottle. Twitter et al are simply more compelling a conversational medium than blog comments. While the close relationship of blog posts and their associated comments may seem like a positive attribute, it is actually very limiting and closed. In general, people have to blunder into an interesting comment thread by moving to the post, opening the link to the comments, and manually scrolling down through them. A lot of time and effort, all based around the metaphor of wandering around in the web of pages. It's like a trip to the library.

Twitter and other similar apps are based on the web of flow: information of interest comes to us, not the other way around. And it flows through people, through relationships: it's not a bunch of clicks on URLs, scrolling, and so on. It's a move away from hunting and gathering and into relationship agriculture: information grows in our flow applications instead of us spending time hunting it down.

So, what are blogs going to be when the conversation moves away? They will be the place where we archive our posts, so that people can find them when they need to search, which still is a necessity.

But today's blog technologies were not designed with flow in mind: they are based on Web 1.0 principles, and although they have helped to engender a revolution in sociality and flow, they don't support it very well. This opens up an important new are for competition in the marketplace, perhaps, but more importantly, a new way to think about the role of social media. (Note: In the Workstreamr application, which is based on social media at a fundamental level, we have also architected flow into the solution at an equally fundamental level.)

The way I am getting tugged to blog posts is increasingly as a mention within a conversational bite in Twitter or Friendfeed. I then click out of the flow to see the larger post, and offer my view in the flow -- not on the blog -- and then I return to the flow, where I will be spending most of my time.

This makes sense: I want to talk about the blog post with the person who brought it to my attention, more so that with some group of strangers at the blog, or even the author, who I may not know at all.

I also don't think we can expect the fragmentation of the social experience to slow down: it will get a lot worse before it gets better.

We can expect new tools and technologies that will take advantage of this new dynamic to emerge almost immediately. I have more ideas on this topic, so more to follow.

Comments

[Loic]

"the genie cannot be back in the bottle" nicely put! I am wondering too.

btw you have tweeted a password protected url instead of this url /me thinks

[Rodney Rumford]

The flow of conversations has moved in the micro-blogging social river of sites like twitter, jaiku, pownce. While i agree that the genie is out of the bottle; people will continue to use blogs for many reasons.

having long form thought expression will not go away. having a central repository for all thoughts around a specific subject matter topic works well for blogs. The social toolsets currently fragment how we communicate. Don't get me wrong, i love it. But new tools will evolve and will quite possibly rollup into a new toolsets.

imagine if there was intelligent technology that could determine content and context (of sites like twitter, pownce,etc.) and auto-roll it into nice pies for consumption and distribution.

just my 2 cents.

Rodney

[Ben Tremblay]

I won't go into the etiology of my concept ... I could, and it would involve a hippe-bus in '68 and RainbowFamily campfires in the late 70s ... but decades ago I saw that our democratic institutions and civil society itself needed something like coherence. (Isn't that a wonderful word? Not "structured hierarchically with authoritarian rigour" but ... cohering, nothing more. Like the bonds that entrain a dynamically balanced complex system with the consequences of its environment.)

For the record I think we have seriously mis-construed "social object". That we are, as though magpies and blue-jays, attracted to the newest shiny bobble in our view doesn't make that process social. It derives from the fact that investigating potential threats might reveal food and very probably give us a cheap thrill. But "social"? Hardly.

Chaotic systems are "ordered" in that the internal relations (hidden to our view) are deeply meaningful. What passes for social behavior, on the other can, can be little more than random fun-filled bewilderment.

I recommend you to Wiki collaboration leads to happiness (great graphic!), via Euan Semple.

[Elliott Ng]

@stoweboyd,

I recently had the same zen slap realization and posted on it here: http://urltea.com/2zzv

Also @shegeeks posted on this
http://corvida.ilumine.net/social-aggregators-give-me-my-comments/

I think people influential in social media (er...how about you? :) should press the makers of social media aggregators to provide widgets with fine-grained control over what is streamed back through the widget to allow for reconsolidating comments back at the blog.

[Stowe Boyd]

Elliott - I had that conversation yesterday with Chris Saad of Particls!

Ben - I like the deep meaning of relationships, myself, as a structuring principle. Also the cognitive science insights about the way our minds work (and can't work).

Rodney - I agree about macroblogging: we will need a place to post. But the conversation isn't going to be there, at least not initially. Maybe secondarily.

Loic - Fixed bad link, thanks.

[Solacetech]

This a common conversation soon to be expounded upon outside the "blogsphere". It feels like one conscience stream. Like we are all mentally connected via this flow of information. Thankfully for now this "lifestream" hasn't become "Mainstream" yet, it still has a ways to go...

[Steve Ardire]

> Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation -- the comments thread on blog posts -- to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others.

Yes for ADD people ( Attention Deficit Disorder ) who think being in the real time flow for meaningless conversation is hip and cool !

In other words mostly drivel with little substance !

[Stowe Boyd]

Steve - Actually, it turns out that those most likely to be involved in this transition are folks that have been blogging themselves for a long time.

What's your beef, Steve? If you think Twitter and so on are just drivel, don't play. I think it's just a matter of exposure, but it does seem to piss some people off, for reasons I don't clearly understand.

[Paul Chaney]

I agree that there are a number of viable uses for blogs, not the least of which is as a forum for long-form expression. In fact, I think blogs have found (or are finding) their place in the megatropolis that is social media. I also think the conversation ebbs and flows back and forth between the "flow" and the blog.

Further, I think, via the use of widgets and/or plug-ins, a blog can become a repository for the other forms of conversation taking place, though not the locus of it necessarily. For example, my own blog which, like yours, uses Typepad's platform, allows for the integration of other content sources...Twitter posts being one.

Smarter apps like FriendFeed will be developed that can aggregate content from all the disparate sources, but in a more brandable way. For me, for now, I still depend on my blog as the foundation of all (well, most) of my social media interactions. And not a foundation only, but an anchor in the flow. It serves a critical function to be sure.

[Matt Rogers]

The "flow" infantilizes. While blogs may not be Dostoevskyian their depth they at least require some level of reflection to make a decent post. If the future "flow" offers "wl u b my bff" then newspeak is already here and didn't require a totalitarian society to arrive and count me out and a luddite if this is the future.

[Stowe Boyd]

Matt - I totally disagree. This isn't the future, this is today. PS Newspeak was really about control of thought through control of language: flow is about the form/factor of human interaction, not l33t.

Paul - Alas, I think (as I said) that conversation is moving away from blogs. You can pull it back with widgets and so on, but that's just a transitional stopgap.

[Beth Kanter]

How much of this transition is -- is a transition to more conversational texting? What is gained do you think by this faster form of conversation?

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