Twitter Activity Streams: Surfacing Social Gestures Like Tumblr

Twitter is preparing to roll out a fairly significant rethinking of the user experience for the microstreaming service. They are planning to bring the social gestures that users make out in the open. These gestures are the actions of following people, favoriting tweets, retweets, or adding people to lists. Some of that gestural information has been available in Twitter to date, but most of it hasn’t been found in the stream along with the tweets themselves.

The change will come by changing the ‘@mentions’ tab into two:

MG Siegler, Twitter Comes Alive With Realtime Activity Streams

Specifically, the “@Mentions” tab on twitter.com is being replaced by two new tabs: “@USERNAME” and “Activity”. These two streams will add an additional layer to Twitter and to Tweets themselves, a layer showing the social activity around them.

The @USERNAME (obviously, USERNAME will be replaced by your Twitter name) stream will still show your @replies, but it will also show things like when someone follows you, when someone favorites one of your Tweets, when someone retweets one of your Tweets, or when someone adds you to a list.

The Activity stream will show you all of those things, but related to all of the people you follow on Twitter. In other words, you can see if a connection has retweeted a Tweet, or if they followed someone new, etc.

Siegler doesn’t say that the current Timeline tab — which shows the tweets from you and all that you follow — will remain unchanged, but that is my interpretation at present.

Surfacing social gestures in general — and making favoriting a social preoccupation instead of a not very robust bookmarking tool — is a great way to make Twitter a richer social experience. In fact, this shift feels like Twitter has taken a long hard look at Tumblr, and has decided to capitalize on that social networked blogging platform’s success, which is driven to a great extent by the richness of social gestures, which are presented in stream. Here’s a snippet of my Tumblr stream, showing gestures and a post:

I wrote a piece not too long ago, What Twitter Could Learn From Tumblr, which focused on the efforts that Tumblr has recently put into its support of tags, and curation of tagged topics. (For those still not familiar with Tumblr, you might read Comparing Tumblr To Wordpress.)

But it seems like the social gestures of Tumblr — which are natively presented in the Tumblr stream — will be the first innovation to jump from Tumblr to Twitter.

I wonder if Twitter will take the ‘notes’ idea from Tumblr, as well? In Tumblr, all the social gestures associated with a post can be displayed on that post’s page (depending on the template settings). So If I post something that garners a great deal of interest — getting liked and reposted a great deal — there is a long series of gestures shown on that page. In a sense, the post has it’s own associated stream: all the gestures that it caused.

On Twitter this would mean that the page associated with a tweet — the one reached by clicking on the tweet’s timestamp — might show all the favorites and retweets tied to the tweet. Will have to see if this will be done.

And oh, there is still all that work to be done on tags, which Twitter still doesn’t seem to be very interested in, yet.

Has Tumblr Damped Down The Social Gestures?

I have this sneaking feeling that Tumblr is filtering out social gestures in the new Dashboard facelift.

Prior to the recent redo, I could open the dashboard, and then click on the number of posts I had created. This would filter out the posts from people I am following, and leave a/ my posts, and b/ the social gestures of others, like new people following me, rebloggings, answers to questions, and likes.

Now, when I select my stoweboyd blog, and click the posts button, I can see some social gestures interspersed with my posts, but only going back a day or maybe a few hours. But I can’t get at any earlier social gestures, so far as I know, and I want them back.

Disqus Releases ‘Likes’

This morning I noticed this on my site:

From the Disqus blog:

(Re)Introducing Community Likes

This feature continues Disqus’ goal to help pull a true community out of the audience that visits your site. Liking comments has been a core piece of Disqus since the beginning, and we’re now extending this feedback mechanism to the top-level page or article itself. Community Likes is an easy, quick way for your visitors to give feedback and make their presence known on your site, all without having to post an actual comment.

Community Likes also functions as a slick way for people to share the article on Facebook and Twitter (only if they give it a thumbs up — but don’t worry, we’ve been seeing over 90% likes over dislikes). That means that liking content with Disqus’ buttons taps into the power of both Facebook’s and Twitter’s social networks.

Hmmm. Aside from the fact that I think blogs and websites can have ‘true community’ without Disqus comments, I like the idea of what they are up to, especially for blogs and websites that are a bit short on social gestures.

But for me, and others that are using Tumblr and other platforms that already have a ‘likes’ capability, we are going to have a clash of social engagement. Should a visitor to this post use the Tumblr ‘like’ or the Disqus ‘like’? Or both? Is there some way for a blog publisher to collate these together?

This is perhaps (yet another) situation where you have wonder Tumblr doesn’t implement its own integrated commenting solution. It is inviting this sort of confusion, or worse, watching the rich social integration of Tumblr getting diluted by third party commenting plug-ins, like Disqus or JS-Kit.

I am going to watch and see what happens, but I am sure confusion is going to ensue. Disqus offers publishers the means to disable these features, which is my first instinct, I confess.

What do you think? Which would you use?

WordPress Releases ‘Like’ And ‘Reblog’: We Need TumbleBacks, People!

WordPress is following the lead of Tumblr and other blog platforms (like Typepad) and adopting at least one part the ‘poststream’ model that Tumblr pioneered. The Tumblr poststream model has two ‘sides’:

The Outside View — When Tumblr users are looking at other Tumblr-hosted blogs, they see several controls that are not visible to non-users. Along with the blog content, they see ‘like’, ‘reblog’, ‘follow’ and ‘dashboard’ icons, like this:

The ‘like’ button (the heart) is a way to create a haptic gesture that winds up on the post’s ‘notes’ list, a history of all the ways that the post has been touched by others.

The ‘reblog’ button makes a copy of the post on the user’s blog, and adds that action to the original post’s notes history.

Clicking the ‘follow’ adds the blog to the user’s list of followed blogs, which is a perfect segue to the second view in the poststream model.

The Inside View — When the user logs into Tumblr (or when they clink on ‘dashboard’ after being logged in), they are presented their Tumblr dashboard, which aggregates posts from all the blogs that the user is following, plus posts from their own blog, and notes that other users’ actions have left on posts. Here’s the third page of my Tumblr dashboard from this morning (I wanted to show a note and the page controls):

The ‘like’ and ‘reblog’ controls are displayed on all the posts in the poststream, and work in the same way as described.

You can see that wakeupfromthedramscene has started following my UnderpaidGenius blog. Other notes also are displayed, although their are none in this page of my poststream:  reblogs, likes, and answers to questions (any text post that ends with a question mark allows for answers to questions to be accumulated).

WordPress Adopts (Part Of) The Outside View Of The Poststream Model

WordPress announced (without any reference to Tumblr) support for ‘like’ and ‘reblog’ — a subset of the outside view.

Today we’re introducing a new like and reblog feature enabled across the whole of WordPress.com. When you’re logged in to WordPress.com and viewing a post you’ll notice a new link in the admin bar at the top of the page. If you really enjoyed the post then you can click the “Like” link to signify this. This will then show the author how many readers liked the post.

Once you’ve liked the post, the link will change to “You like this” and you’ll be presented with some new options via a drop down menu. You can also access this menu at any time in the future by hovering over the “You like this” link in the same way other menu items work.

Wordpress offers up a list of the posts that the user has ‘liked’ but doesn’t seem to implement anything like the outside view. However, I have to imagine that they will trend in that direction, simply based on competitive pressures.

A Growing Divide In Blogistan, And The Need For Tumblebacks

I guess that all WordPress users will be happy with the new features. But as soon as they become used to ‘like’ and ‘reblog’ they are going to experience a real annoyance: when they land on a Tumblr blog post they will not be able to ‘reblog’ or ‘like’ it. Why? Because the competitors in the blog platform space do not seem to want to play together nicely.

When I first started to gripe about this divided world, last year, David Sippey of Typepad said that he would be willing to support the development of some interoperable means to support cross-platform interoperability, which I started to call ‘Tumblebacks’. But I got nowhere with the folks at Tumblr.

A Call For Interoperable Tumbling: Tumblebacks

I would like to expand briefly on what I think is called for.

1. A convention — like trackbacks — needs to be established, so that a message can be sent by one platform, like Typepad, to another, like Tumblr, on behalf of an author. I propose we call this ‘tumbleback’, plural ‘tumblebacks’.
2. Let’s say I want to reblog a post from a Tumblr blog on my Typepad blog. I might use a Typepad bookmarklet that is Tumblr-aware. When I select a post on a Tumblr blog, and use the reblog capability in the bookmarklet, it would a/ post the reblog on my Typepad blog, and b/ send a message to Tumblr, indicating the reblog.
3. The cross-platform reblog would look much like a regular, within a single platform reblog, with the name and URL of the source blog displayed.
4. The message sent from Typepad on my behalf would be received by Typepad, and the fact that I reblogged the post could be included on the ‘notes’ history associated with the source blog post. This means that readers of the original post would see that I had reblogged it.
5. Tumblr might send a message back to Typepad including information that would allow Typepad to display the notes history of the source blog on the post I created. Alternatively, this could be provided by an API. Likewise, as other Typepad users reblog my post Typepad could pass these notes along. In this way the full reblog history (and favorites or likes, as well) could be maintained at the original source post, and shared by everyone.
6. I think some new microsyntax is called for, that would indicate the platform, author, and other metadata associated with these cross-platform trails. More to follow on that.
7. The addition of downstream reblogs and likes/favorites could be added to the streams of participants by the various services.

It’s a non-trivial technical challenge, and can’t be simply accomplished with RSS, as some have suggested. But most importantly, we need a united Blogistan, not three or ten separate worlds, all implementing essentially similar services but not in an interoperable way.

We should all exert pressure on these vendors to agree to interoperability around the blogstream social dimension of blogging. I would be happy to participate in a working group on the subject, and I have had some support — like Michael Sippey — but otherwise, nothing.

While the vendors may think that their interests are served by non-interoperability, consider the instant messaging marketplace, where the three major players — AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft — effectlively lost their importance when web 2.0 generation social tools came along. Had they done the opposite back in the late 90’s and early ’00s — created an interoperable set of standards for IM and opened that platform up for developers to build on — they might have benefitted from the social revolution instead of being sidelined by it.

The blog vendors may wind up in the same spot.