Comments on: Glue and Comments

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

I think this is a continual failure in the thinking of the tech elite versus the mainstream. The mainstream is pretty accepting of "broken" and "fractured". Me personally, every picture I've taken in the last few years goes to Flickr, but if you talk to regular people, they've got some on Snapfish, some on Facebook, some still stuck on their phone… some on their hard drive not even backed up. Same goes with the way teens use MySpace. They regularly delete profiles and start all over again, or just abandon and start anew. They don't "manage" multiple profiles the way some of the tech elite seem to want to.

Enterprise glue was valuable because the owner of the data could point to cost efficiencies and business intelligence that could be glean from more smoothly operating systems. For consumers, though, they just don't value each byte at the same level. Sure, there's scale, but living in a digital scattershot is pretty low on the list of painpoints for the average person.

By: PXLated

PXLated — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

"brings the overall conversation associated with my blog post back to my blog where I actually want it"
———-
Exactly. I don't want to chase the people I follow and the conversations they generate all over the universe. You're one of the first I've seen express this desire to consolidate. Everyone else send one elsewhere and I'm not following.

By: eddie_lebr12311

eddie_lebr12311 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

That's a great feature for intensedebate. One question: with Facebook emulating FriendFeed's imported items commentary feature, will intensedebate (or Disqus) be able to pull those comments as well, or are they blocked by the Facebook wall?

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Charlie – I disagree. If this is “invisible to the user” it will be a very happy thing. The idea that the mainstream is pretty accepting of “broken” and “fractured” is fine, but it’s accepting because it’s use to computers not working! For example, my mother – who is DEFINITELY part of the mainstream, would love her photos to just be “wherever she wants them” without having to think about it.

By: PhilW

PhilW — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Just because the mainstream is resigned to having to make do with 'broken' and 'fractured' doesn't mean they like it.

By: tom

tom — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Eddie, it's a great question. Integrating with Facebook is on our short list. (Any experienced Facebook developers want to help?)

In the long run, it will be self-defeating for Facebook to be a walled-garden. The new social web is open – which is part of the reason that IntenseDebate is all about integrating your "comment-like" content from everywhere, and making it available everywhere.

Tom
IntenseDebate

By: Emil Sotirov

Emil Sotirov — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Say "loosely joined" instead of "broken" and "fractured"… and suddenly the mainstream "gets" the web better than the tech elite. I am pretty sure this is exactly the case – and the reason we have tons of new startups doing things to please the tech elite and destined to be failures with the mainstream.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

While this is great from the publishers point of view in that it keeps the conversation all together, the whole blog post/comments/discussion "framework" (for lack of a better term) is stil very broken from the reader's side.

If I jump into a conversation surrounding a post, it usually means I'm very interested in it (duh). But getting emails for each reply that gets posted in the comments of a blog post I "subscribe" to? That's so 1999

There has to be a better way. If your blog is able to implement a comment system that grabs comments posted elsewhere and integrate it back into the comments of the appropriate post, someone has to be able to build an app that accomplishes this for the user.

Seems like something that would fit very well into an app like NewsGator. For example, I already use NewsGator Online to read all of the blogs that I'm interested in. If they had a part of the app where I can keep track of the posts that I am interested in being involved in the conversation, that would be awesome! It's almost like taking all of the comment "threads" from the posts I subscribe to and turning them into a discussion forum type of format, to make it crazy easy to follow along…while cutting down on the email I have to receive to stay up to date on these conversations.

Maybe something like this already exists and I just don't know abou it?

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

That's certainly valid. If you want to have those conversations in email because that is where you work, you certainly should.

An intense debate plugin for outlook that "automagically" knew what conversations you were involved in and kept you in the loop on them could be pretty damn cool.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

One other thought is the whole "trackback" system of relating blog posts.

Example: Your post pointing out the post about the failure of Monitor110. It's great that the original post is able to list the related posts in the trackback section so readers can see what other people are saying about it. But in a perfect world, all of the comments from all of these "related" posts could be in one place so that we can see the whole conversation at once. I suppose that is sort of what TechMeme does at the post level.

At any rate, I do agree that your original example is very cool, and it's cool because it works and you do not have to do any extra work to get all of those comments back here.

By: michael

michael — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Mike, great point. This is one of our goals at IntenseDebate – we want to simplify your commenting experience. With this in mind, we enable commenters who have created IntenseDebate accounts to track comments made on a post via RSS readers, including NewsGator.

So create an account and your wish will be granted!

Cheers,
Michael
IntenseDebate

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Mike – I totally agree with you. Closing the loop – especially on the reader side – is where it needs to go.

Since I spend so much time in email, I actually like the interaction by email approach, but I agree that it all needs to be one big closed loop that works any way the user wants it to

By: gregorylent

gregorylent — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

"glue" is present when a service gets closer to modeling reality, or nature, which is perfectly glued, just not obvious except to an ecologist or a mystic.

one-to-one correspondence for action/reaction, stimulus/adjustment. is a decent measure for glue-ness …

and now i want a software/platform, where the conversation is the blog … which models many relationships in life … on ongoing flow