The state of conversations on the internet
Ever since Twitter started having brain damage, I’ve been seeing a trend that I hoped would stop. People are using ping.fm, a service that blasts your microblogging messages to multiple sites, and are having a hard time keeping up with the sites that they’re sending the messages to.
Pownce was Twitter’s competition last year, but it hasn’t caught on due to its slow site and confusing interface. It’s nice that the converstations stay self-contained, but it’s a walled garden; you can’t see any parts of the conversations outside of Pownce itself.
Plurk is very similar to Pownce except it doesn’t allow you to share files, but it does keep the conversation self-contained. Its interface is quirky to some, bothersome to others.
Identi.ca is almost exactly like Twitter except it’s open source which means that people can build updates to the system and not have to wait several months or years for features to be pushed, unlike Twitter which hasn’t pushed any new features in years (hello, Twitter, how about a search function?).
Friendfeed has to be the worse offender. I didn’t realize this until this morning, but FriendFeed allows you to reply to Tweets inside or outside FriendFeed. If you don’t reply outside FriendFeed, the reply stays in FF and whoever wrote the Tweet may never see it. Also, it could spawn a whole new set of replies in FF itself which the original poster may never see.
So, to sum up, I did a quick and dirty diagram of the state of the microblogging conversations.
Layer 0 shows ping.fm at the top which blasts the messages to the services on layer 1. Layer 2 is where things get messy. You can see pownce and plurk’s walled gardens where nothing gets out. Identi.ca has replies which can be seen inside and outside the site.
The relationship between Twitter and FriendFeed is the messiest. Messages are pulled into FF from Twitter and the replies, in different shades of green on layer 2, shows how replies can come directly from Twitter, from FF with replies to Twitter directly, or only going to Friendfeed itself.
It’s a mess. Hopefully this will all shake out in the next year.
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Great post–since I started using Ping.fm, this question of siloed microblogging platforms has been on my mind. And with the “private” issue of the new Twirl iteration this week that captures Twitter, FriendFeed, and seesmic posts, microblogging management issues are now just a little more complex. The larger issue of aggregating your feeds vs. aggregating the platforms to which you post call into question just how much you have to be “everywhere” and participate in every conversation. I know several folks, like @banannie, who have already opted out of platforms like identi.ca. Perhaps we just need to put our virtual sticks in the sand and say, “I’ll send out general posts through Ping, but my conversations take place at ______.” My dos centavos.