This comes after responding to one of usagijen’s shared notes via twitter, and being struck with the realization of the confining communication mechanism known as microblogging micro-conversing. It’s not an issue with microblogging, obviously strict-length updates are advantageous, but it is a problem with the nature of responding/messaging within a stream that was constructed for single-forward-broadcasting.
Stem theory: if an event-item is posted, a time-dependent, stemmed discussion should be readily available in it’s own persistent thread.
The implication is that when an event is posted, a time window should be opened for direct discussion on the given event. In this time, a dedicated thread should be available for quick response/conversation about the initial event. Replies to the event, within the window will be logged in the discussion as they are written-through a user’s own stream (standard @reply). Directly corresponded entries will be logged in the discussion, but not written [back] to the users’ streams.
The discussion should remain open for a given, system-dependent, time frame.
Notes: I haven’t implemented such a thing, though it wouldn’t be very difficult. Basically, everything remains the same, but when viewing a stream item (ie status, event, etc) it acts a topic of chat, but messages will not be logged like regular statuses.
That’s an excellent idea, since I believe that most of the input that goes into melative/twitter implicitly comes with hope of feedback, so indeed, it’s rather micro-conversing as you said. I think that giving people a means to reply without clogging a public stream/status would make most sense in this time and age. Actually, I think that’s the direction twitter will be evolving in very soon too, because as far as I see (for a few rabid exceptions…) I see more and more @replies there, and often, you need to look up several pages before finding its origin. Keeping it all together nice and tidy will definitely be great. Go for it!
Thanks for the positive feedback. Sadly, I don’t think twitter will be doing it, since after thinking about it, Jaiku has this similar thing with it’s comment threads/status… I think twitter would have pushed towards it in late 2007, when google purchased Jaiku. Also, they are pushing with many other things such as reliability and swapping out their code base…. features take 2nd.
And you are very correct with the @reply syndrome, which I don’t mind a few, but when I glance someone’s stream and it’s 80% @replies, I wonder why the hell they are not sitting in a chat/im which is meant for that. It would be much cleaner to allow comment-like discussion on events (like Jaiku), and also more useful in seeing a flow of conversation rather than the random responses that -may- appear in your stream…. crazy
O.o actually, what’s funny about when I post stuff on melative, I don’t often care if anyone reads it, but I’m more interested in seeing the overall reaction… without users there is none… and depending on twitter isn’t going to work since it has no categorical contexts and every user has different naming conventions for series…