Can we talk?
I recently dug up this little gem for last year:
“Social RSS” wait, isn’t that just Twitter and Facebook?
— Noah Mittman (@noahmittman) August 22, 2011
At the time, I was joking about a new startup with a press release about creating such a thing, and I wasn’t all that serious about lumping Twitter into the mix.
But that’s what’s come to be: in the race to be as much of a “place” as Facebook is, Twitter has been increasingly supporting RSS-like behavior, creating email digests, adding “discover” tabs, and structuring inline previews for content outside its walls.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the majority of my followers having full-on conversations on Twitter—it’s simply gotten too crowded and busy, and there’s been less back-and-forth and much more publish-and-comment activity. And it actually seems fine, and almost natural given the massive influence it has as a real-time Internet thing.
It’s another reason why I have some faith in App.net becoming an awesome system, because it has the potential of having those two activities—sharing links, and simply talking to each other—as discrete facets of the same backend. Facets that I could easily switch between, given the right foundation, and have a dimensionality that Twitter won’t have in its rush to appeal to Publishers. I’ve seen people just pumping URLs into their ADN streams, and I’m kinda hoping that later releases gives them a better outlet for that, or, even better, they just leave that kind of activity to Twitter.
As I said before, I’m not a huge fan of decentralized system for “microblogging” (and ooh, do I dislike that term). At its best, it’s public chat around the virtual water cooler, and you want to be stumbling around within the biggest office on Earth. Now, if I can’t relay the entire scene in real-time, then I must either compromise scope or timing, and need to:
- have a localized, synchronous scene, or
- have a complete, asynchronous one.
The former are chat networks, and the latter is the Web.
Everything else in between has essentially been done, and done in more mature methods. Toss in your Laconi.cas or your IRCs for standards. Toss in your Lithiums or your Campfires for your private businesses. These are not the compelling implementations. Destinations like Twitter and Facebook are, to the general public. It’s because they provide the illusion that everyone is there.
So let Twitter become social RSS, I don’t mind. We can use a single place to freely share & discuss links. But I also still hope for a single place to just connect and talk, too.
