If there’s one thing about Friendfeed I have truly enjoyed, it’s the conversation. There simply hasn’t been a place online that has driven me to throw my opinions and thoughts into in depth discussions more than the little innovation machine from Silicon Valley, which yesterday announced they would be gobbled up by Facebook.
Most folk are likely to immediately suggest Twitter as an alternative conversation hub. Whether you and I like it or not, Twitter is NOT conversation. It’s announcements, announcements and more announcements with the occasional response, and that is great, but its not conversation.
While Facebook digests Friendfeed, we may see an increase in open discussion on the social networking behemoth but again, lets face it, its unlikely we’ll ever see the open discussion platform Friendfeed is/was.
So I ask you, where do you find the most healthy discussion? Is there such a place? The first place that comes to mind is Hacker News, but even there, its not really a community as such and its highly targeted to the developer/entrepreneur type. There’s Digg, YouTube, etc. lets not even go there. Where else is there a genuinely awesome platform for open discussion across a variety of topics? Heck, any topic? The ability to integrate media (photos, video) into the discussions is a bonus. The only site that appears to not have me immediately dismissing it is the still in beta, Redux.
Have you tried http://a.tinythread.com/ ?
Its a twitter thread thing.
Dude, just go to a forum site — old skool style.
Like how artists have http://www.wetcanvas.com — there’s GOT to be a forum for whatever you’re into.
There WERE conversations online before FF, and there will be afterward too…
The place to go is http://www.jaiku.com for your threaded conversations.
+1 Jaiku, definitely. Btw, it has never been shutdown by google and it is now open sourced. :)
I second Google Wave. It’s great even now, but we should be able to invite others we know who don’t mind the dev state and would be willing to help develop it.
Your local coffeeshop, pub, bar, restaurant, library, gym … you know, conversations with actual people :-)
We need to get out more anyway, and talking with people with different backgrounds, often yield surprising results, try it.
Heyo Zee, been following your friendfeed statuses on building43 on my stream for a while now. I believe we are going to see many open social media platforms develop and then converge on a common interface of information sharing.
Millions of hubs will allow for user owned real time information sharing, focused on promoting the wonderful conversations we’ve had the pleasure of having in friendfeed.
I’ve postulated a method of real time search, the primary reason for centralized real time social media channels, within a federated network by propagating search like status.
http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/08/21/real-time-search-over-federated-networks/