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]

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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.