Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Conversation fragmentation to the sub-atomic level

I don't know where this started, or where it might end, but I'm certainly familiar with the middle.

Let's start with a tweet from Andy C:

@dmondark Replying to a blog comment on Twitter (so you see it). Sorry - that 'Country Feedback' cover isn't me. I dearly wish it was :-)

Andy subsequently tweeted:

So now I am replying to blog comments on Twitter so the author can see them and I get them on FF. The conversation is now truly fragmented.

But I didn't originally see this in Twitter. I saw it in FriendFeed.

posted a message on Twitter

“So now I am replying to blog comments on Twitter so the author can see them and I get them on FF. The conversation is now truly fragmented.


So, if you've followed things so far,

  • an unknown blog post resulted in

  • a tweet on Twitter

  • that showed up on FriendFeed.
Sorry, but I couldn't leave well enough alone.

First, I noted on FriendFeed that I liked the tweet.

Then, I stumbled upon Andy C's FriendFeed entry.

From a blog to Twitter to FriendFeed, and now to Stumbleupon. Just to prove an idiotic point, I guess.

Then I commented at Andy C's FriendFeed entry, taking care to also send the response to Twitter.

This, of course, resulted in two additional FriendFeed entries - one for the Stumbleupon thingie I did, and one for my tweet.

And now this blog post, which will eventually result in another FriendFeed entry.

But we're going to leave off with Andy's comment to the FriendFeed entry for my tweet (and, of course, Andy also sent this to Twitter):

Where is it all going to end ? /dev/null probably :-) -

If we're lucky.

P.S. Incidentally, I discovered (but have not yet tested) a feature on Quotably that addresses an issue that I raised earlier. From the Quotably FAQ:

Due to the nature of twitter, there is no way to know for sure what message an @reply is responding to. We currently follow the same heuristic as Twitter and assume the reply was targeted at the last message of the user in question. For cases where this is incorrect, you may fix the threading by hand using the "fix threading" links that follow each message.

P.P.S. In response to another tweet from Andy, I should note that FriendFeed was my seventh most popular source of traffic to my blog over the last thirty days. This in a month where one of my posts caught the fancy of Engadget (#5 source) and Groklaw (#3). For the record, my other top sources of traffic were Google (#1), direct (#2), Yahoo (#4), Blogger (#6), AOL (#8), Technorati (#9), and Twitter (#10). Stumbleupon, by the way, was #41.

P.P.P.S. If you want to send traffic Andy C's way, go to this April 1 post of his.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I normally love reursion but, even after 13 readings in a darkened room, that post still leaves me confused.

PS. Please add Disqus to this blog. I am currently offered:

Google/Blogger
OpenID (OK)
Name/URL
Anon

..or maybe I should have just commented on FriendFeed.

Oh no - here we go again...

Ontario Emperor said...

Andy,

I've been mulling over Disqus (which I believe is compatible with Blogger), but I haven't started looking at in in earnest yet.

My little exercise does suggest the question of how one can establish traceability between disparate items. I did some manual linking here and in FriendFeed to establish the connections, but there has to be an easier way.

Still have to follow up on that Quotably feature, by the way.