ext337

Apr 17, 04:33 am: Are specialized tools contributing to the fractured conversation?

I don’t know. I’d like to get that out of the way upfront. Okay. Now that the pressure is off.

Three years ago, five years ago, I was saying that blogging was about the conversation. About the ability share short snippets of information or thoughts easily and quickly.

And now I’m saying that about Twitter

And it seems Twitter has taken on a kind of blogging – microblogging is to easy a phrase. It’s seems there are a passel of tools that have taken on microblogging. Twitter is one, okay, but so is are social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. Tumblr also has a place in that list. Taken together, those tools are specialized bits of what used to be blogging.

Does that mean that blogging has matured? Is about making a place for the wide range of sharing that used to happen under the label of blogging?

I’m not trying to get old school here (back in the day we all used blogger. And we liked it. Hell, we loved it. There was snow). I am trying to understand how the tools are fracturing along with the conversation.

And if the tools that we use to talk on the Internet are becoming increasingly more specialized it makes sense that the conversation is fractured. Things like friendfeed, Facebook, and even some of the revamps in MyBlogLog approach the problem from one direction, by pulling together a life stream and giving people a way to subscribe and interact with it.

But is that helping. Sure it creates a unified presence but I’m not sure that really unifies the conversation. And do we even need to unify it? I mean, in regular walking around life conversations are fractured. Interactions with the same people are dictated by the environment (we may be talking to the same people, literally, but we probably to talk to them different in a bar than we do in a meeting room). They change because we are moving through time and space and changing our minds. Why shouldn’t the Internet be like that?

In the 3D world, though, we know the strength of our ties. But do we know them on the Internet? I mean, maybe I can upload my address book and be connected to people on anyone of a gazillion services but there might be someone, on one service, with whom I have a deeper relationship. How do we measure and see those?

What do you think? Are fractured conversations good or bad? If we want to unify them, what do we use to do that? Is it already there? Or is it missing?

Tags: nptech, net2, conversation, fractured, tools, evolution, tools, socialgraph