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Let’s Watch Twitter Become FriendFeed
It seems the hot Twitter news of the day is that the service might be slowing in U.S. growth. You can read the Twitter stats story on Mashable and TheNextWeb. Earlier in the week the big news for the so-called social media experts was the on and off status of the new “retweet architecture system”. Twitter turned it on for many users (I was not one of them) but then turned it off so they could fix some bugs.
Apparently there are two camps when it comes to the new retweets…one camp likes the consolidated concept and the other camp hates it because they can’t add their 2-cents to the conversation. My guess is that 90% of re-sharing on Twitter is either direct sharing of something Mashable posted or the addition of “lol”.
This past summer I wrote about how Friendfeed could generate massive income and also reach the mainstream. Sadly that never happened because Friendfeed sold out to Facebook. While it looks like Facebook wasn’t reading, this morning I started to think that perhaps Twitter was. What really got me thinking was something I read on Patricia Handschiegel’s blog. While she discusses the way Twitter defined their service in the beginning, she uses the word forum throughout the column.
Could Twitter be moving towards “threaded conversations” similar to what a forum offers? We know that the new retweet functionality will keep everyone’s “like” below the master/initial comment. We also know users want a way to add their own thoughts to the initial comment. Could the threaded conversation mechanism be a way to please both groups? Just like what any forum offers today. And just like the way Friendfeed and Facebook handle the conversation today.
All of this leads me back to the dip in usage. Forums are very sticky because the conversation is centralized and everyone wants “in”. As I’ve written about until my fingers fall off, the conversation is currently so fragmented on Twitter. If Twitter continues to move towards full-Friendfeed, it could mean increased usage.
I liked FriendFeed but have since moved to Cliqset along with most of my friends. I hope their community continues to grow.
it’s funny how facebook is trying to become more like twitter while twitter is trying to become more like facebook, i’m not complaining though, best of both worlds imo :)
This is a great idea. The inability to surface conversation / comments is a huge drawback in Twitter, this is why any discussion usually disappears much faster than it otherwise would.
The only problem I see is that Twitter so far has shown little inclination to bring persistence/permanence to anything past about 7 days (as far as visibility in the UI is concerned). Which makes you wonder if they would start (or even could handle) showing backward conversation context indefinitely.
But I agree that in principle they are not far from being able to do threaded commenting with what they’ve got. In fact, a real benefit over FriendFeed would be comment (i.e. tweet) permalinks and nesting ability (reply to comment), both of which never made it into FF.
Now if Twitter would on such a “discussion page” load in images, videos, and text excerpts, it would indeed look like FF. Too much sanity to hope for? :)
Aren’t you essentially talking about Google Wave? Through not a user, all that I have read about it seems to boil down to “threaded conversations” that you talk about Twitter becoming. Google will just do it live instead of waiting for the response.
Exactly – I was thinking about Google Wave.. sounds very similar to that!
In Twitter, threading is useful to be able to follow along with what is happening now or what just happened and or going back into the recent past and looking at what just happened. Forums are much more evergreen.
I would argue that most tweets have a short shelf life and threading is useful, but not in the same way that a forum is useful where threads are often useful as reference material.
In twitter, the discussions are not categorized and only marginally tagged by keyword (hashtag). So looking backwards to find something would be quite difficult. This is where the search engine partnerships with Google and Bing come in and add value especially if a search could reveal a complete cohesive thread from all the participants.
But how would a search engine rank all the various conversations that took place for the search term Iran Democracy, likely and influence score of the conversation participants. I think you see the problem.
If the new Retweet feature better enables threading but discourages conversation because it does not allow comments to be added, doesn’t defeat itself?
All Twitter would need to do to enable threading would be to turn on searching by the “in_reply_to” field. You can currently found out which tweet a given tweet is in reply to and build the thread up in reverse (like we have done on Tweetree, but without the ability to find tweets that are in reply to your given tweet there is no way to flesh out the thread in the other direction.
All we need is access to a search based on the in_reply_to field and any third-party developer could build a threaded version of Twitter. So far there has been no acknowledgement by Twitter of any interest in going this direction with the API, but here’s hoping they read your blog and take your advice to heart.
Cheers.
[...] make the “stream” live like they have done with the new widget and will be yet another copy of FriendFeed’s features. That will present a whole new slew of new user issues but until that functionality is added, we [...]
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