I have been a big opponent of the vanity twitter use (aka harvesting followers, hoping that “followers” equals “audience”).
In practice, this meant that from a point on, I completely stopped looking who is following me, did not reciprocate at the cost of being perceived as arrogant and kept my follower/following ratio to 4.
Still not content, I unfollowed quite a number of twitterers (some of them pretty big names) on the grounds that they were either producing too much noise, or were talking about things I found irrelevant to me.
For over two years now, I keep experimenting with twitter:
- In the beginning, it was conversations. But as people kept flocking around twitter, conversing became hard, if not impossible.
- Then it was news tracking which, although useful, it was far from complete. Yes, the news came to me, but not the news I was always interested. And with it came a lot of repetition and nonsense.
- Then, based on retweets, it was content discovery and evaluation.
- Occassionaly, it was polls, mini-crowdsourcing, asking questions etc
- Grouping people allowed to create filters: filters for news, for content, for community info.
- Finally, there came mindcasting. The most interesting use of twitter. The one I subscribe.
The grouping feature offered by many twitter clients, has, for a long time, being the single organizing factor that brought some order into chaos.
But, lately, we have another one, far too important: Lists!
Although lists look pretty much as the groups of twitter clients, they are not the same: groups are for the people we follow or those that follow us, while lists are for everyone! This difference is a game changer.
Already people use how often they are listed as a measure of importance, influence or popularity.
But lists have another function: they are metadata. The criteria we use to classify twitterers in lists, describe what they are or how we view them.
Also, lists, unlike groups, can be public, can be viewed and subscribed by others. And as such, they bring focus and attention from another angle.
“Ok”, you might say. “Lists bring new features. So what?”
Lists can bring back the sanity in twitter. They can undermine the follower fallacy, they can bring value to ordinary users as well as to businesses and marketers.
How?
By allowing us to make a fundamental distinction: following is an action of trust and, to some extend, intimacy. Subscribing to a list is willingness to be informed.
So if you are on twitter to spread your message (be it news or offers or corporate messages) seek to be listed, not followed. Your very intention implies that you most likely want to use twitter for broadcasting and not for creating relationships. That is fine. You won’t have to pretend you are a ‘friend’ from now on. You aren’t. You never were. But now message spreading can be done without undermining the everyday experience of ordinary users.
—– end of part I —–
Is the Salmon protocol tasty enough?
October 18, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
Conversations on the social web are mostly performed through comments. But comments are so fragmented! Consider this example:
Obviously the post has stirred some interest and generated a conversation. But the conversation is dispersed in many different places. Publisher looses track of many aspects of the conversation around the post. Commenters also mostly ignore what happens outside their area of interaction with the content: Facebook users ignore the FF commenters etc.
This situation has fired some intense debates. Many publishers think this situation is not in their best interest as potential traffic to their sites is deflected to an ‘aggregator’. Especially publishers that have a financial interest in their site traffic and do not just want their opinions spread, find this particularly not appealing.
To mend this situation, a group in Google is working on a new protocol that will allow comments to ‘return’ back on the original publisher site. The protocol is called Salmon
Salmon protocol logo
and you can get a basic idea of its workings from this presentation.
Salmon does bring back the comments to the publisher site but it does not solve the publishers’ problem. As you can see from slide 4, once a comment is back to the publisher’s site, it is republished back to all its subscribers (including the aggregators). What this would mean is that each aggregator has a full picture of the comments around the post, regardless of origin. From the user’s standpoint there is no need to move to the publisher’s site or to another aggregator for any reason, as the full picture will be available in whatever site the user prefers to frequent. The publishers may object it, but in what right? The publishers’ protests imply they OWN the comments which is hardly the case. The user owns his comments.
But let’s leave aside the publisher’s concern for a moment. Is slamon a good thing for the user? I would argue it is. He can have access to a discussion in its entirety without much hassle. And therefore he might be tempted to engage or engage more.
But there is something still missing: the user does not have easy access to his own comments for ALL pieces of content he has interacted with. And he has no control either. They can disappear with a site that closes down. Or in the simplest case, the can be deleted by the site moderators. This is the problem that systems like disqus, intense debate and JS-Kit are aiming to solve. But they won’t. Because it is very unlike that one of them will become ubiquitus.
I think the problem should be approached from another angle. A comment is a piece of content. There is no distinction in form from any other piece of content. They are both text (or audio or video in some cases). What subordinates a comment-content to the original post-content is notional and semantic: the post-content preceded the comment-content and actually the post-content was what aroused the commenters interest in the issue. But the same applies to a post that pingbacks to another post. So a comment is a piece of content and should have independence.
The question is how?
The issue is related to our digital identities: if in the web -to-come we can have a unique independent central point for our digital identities, this central point could be the originator and hoster of our comments.
A modification of the salmon protocol could easily let this happen: whenever a user comments on a publisher site, the site will send the comment back to the users digital identity home. Likewise, whenever an aggregator receives a user comment, the aggregator sends the comment back to the user home, as well as to the publisher.
I do not think this is difficult to implement although I can predict the frictions about who controls the user’s digital ‘home’. But that’s another issue.
Read also Louis Gray’s post on Salmon
Posted in technology | Tagged Aggregator, atom, comments, digital identity, protocol, salmon | 10 Comments »