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March 17, 2003
Conversation
This post of Anne's, and the comments after it, is placenta-rich with ideas and tidbits. (Plus it says nice things about me.)
The whole "design as conversation" or "software should support conversations" issue gives me a some pause, partly because I've never seen anything online that really resembles a real conversation. Limiting the definition of "conversation" to merely the "you write, then I write, then she writes, then you write" thing of blogs, email, or other online communication isn't really adequate. Needless to say, I don't have any better idea.
But speaking of conversations and communities, what about this: I'd like a way to figure out "what are my friends online talking about right now, and where is that conversation happening?" I want this to be removed from any browsing or blog-reading activities--that's how I find the conversations now, and it's tedious and easy to miss stuff that falls off the front page, so to speak. I'm sure that one of the blog index services could help with this, but as far as I'm aware, there's no way to scale those down to a subset of 10 or 20 people.
Posted by Andrew at March 17, 2003 04:17 PM
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"Placenta-rich"??!! Don't make me take back the nice things I said ;)
Point taken about the term "conversation" - although I'd be inclined to say that conversations come in many forms, and need only involve the process of creating shared understandings through dialogue. Plus, I don't like positioning virtual interactions against "real" ones - those are often enough loaded (and arbitrary) distinctions. But I like your idea about more easily finding out what friends are talking about, as long as it doesn't make it harder to find new friends. And I'd love to hear your ideas about where we might start to do this...
Posted by: Anne at March 17, 2003 04:43 PM
Yes, placenta-rich is a weird (but true) metaphor. Sorry. Maybe something along the lines of "primordial soup" is better.
BTW, it occurs to me that my suggestion is a serious manifestation of "interaction anxiety" as described by Fabio.
Posted by: Andrew at March 18, 2003 01:18 PM