If Robert Scoble Is Right, Then Web 2.0 Is Dead

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira,

on April 12, 2008,

I was determined to remain out of this weekend's bitchmeme. I'm an old-fashioned kind of girl who comments on the blog where the author knows I said something, reads my feeds offline half the time, and doesn't jump on the latest bandwagon when it comes to "conversation."

However, when the headline crossed my radar saying "Era of blogger’s control is over" I realized that for all this caterwauling, people are missing the point. Robert Scoble is missing the point, but then again, there's a suspicion that he's not human anyway.

Forgetting for a minute the page view issue and the ad serving issue, which is probably heresy for me as a professional blogger, the whole driving point of Web 2.0 was supposed to be about the conversation, wasn't it? About being social and discussing topics and building things that made that happen.

I haven't jumped on the FriendFeed bandwagon mainly because I don't like that the conversation takes place ON FriendFeed instead of going back to the origination of the conversation. It became another place to try to track conversations, and now we have another application that not only moves the conversation, but also the content with Shyftr.

The arguments are again being made about copyright and who owns content and pageviews, but the real argument is that spreading the conversation across all these services means it's no longer a conversation.

I may be in the minority in this field; I do this part-time. I like things like sunshine and talking to real-live people without standing there next to them with a cell phone or PDA in my hand telling Twitter that I'm standing next to a real-live person. I can list 100 things I'd rather be doing than signing up for every single new service on the off-chance that part of the conversation I'm missing might be there, or in another place. I don't think there is a single person out there who can keep up with all the conversations taking place on all the services. Not even Robert Scoble. And if it's no longer important to include the conversation starter in the conversation, then it isn't a conversation any longer. It's just a whole lot of noise.

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24 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

Corvida - April 12, 2008 at 05:19 pm PDT

You’re absolutely right, it does become just noise to some extent, at least to the conversation starter who is placed further and further apart from, what I would consider to be their conversation.

Though for some people, it’s just another way to chat amongst a particular network of friends and certain things.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - April 12, 2008 at 05:22 pm PDT

Corvida,

You’re right, but then why do you need Web 2.0 at all? If it isn’t about meeting people and having conversations with them, but is just sticking to groups in a particular network, we had that in 1.0 with forums.
isabella mori - April 12, 2008 at 05:32 pm PDT

being someone who likes sunshine, too (and after spending 3+ hours on some silly techie stuff for one of my blogs, i’m doing that the SECOND i’m done commenting here) i have to confess that i already forgot what scoble said. (i’m not a scoble hater, btw).

the long and short of it is that blogging and twittering and all these other things that we CHOOSE to do because we LIKE it are forms of conversation and conversations are not dead.

so there.

out to look at my camelias.
Leslie Poston - April 12, 2008 at 06:58 pm PDT

My main problem with services like FriendFeed is that I do not have time, as the conversation starter, to track conversations that leave the originating location, and I think it is incredibly selfish for someone commenting to NOT to take the time to comment AT the originating location, as well. It is just polite to tell the “host”, as it were, thanks for starting the party. As for Shyftr - I work hard on my content, both the personal content I write for free and the professional content. It is a big FU to my labor to have it moved off my site.
Grendel - April 12, 2008 at 07:35 pm PDT

This all points back to the pointlessness of all this Web 2.0 stuff… All these conversations and talking are leading to more and more groupthink. There’s more conversation than thought.
RSS Confusion Abounds - April 12, 2008 at 08:04 pm PDT

Leslie - So you don’t want your content on other sites because of other comments, comments that won’t appear on your own site? Then why do you have over 20 icons from those other sites, essentially BEGGING your readers to please add your content to those sites? A bit two faced if you ask me.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - April 13, 2008 at 01:18 am PDT

@Isabella But if the conversation is splintered here, there, and everywhere, requiring you to add more and more services to keep track of it, is that really conversation?

@RSS Confusion It’s a frustrating balancing act, I think. I, for one, rarely use StumbleUpon and Digg and the like. I may submit a site I think people should notice, but I think the only comments I’ve ever made on StumbleUpon at least, were on my own articles someone had submitted. Even if I write my own blog entry in response to someone, they get a trackback. I don’t see that will all these “social” apps.

Shyftr may change everything, and not for the good. Content providers will switch from full-text feeds just to keep people coming to their site, which will alter how we are able to read news. I have too many feeds to have to hit every single site to read full articles; I need to be able to skim quickly to find my interests. If I am interested, I click through to the site to leave a comment.

What Shyftr forgets is that content creators live and die based on the conversation. Nothing makes us happier than comments: not stats, not ad revenue, not a paycheck (although we do appreciate money).
isabella mori - April 13, 2008 at 08:14 am PDT

sorry cyndy i don’t think i was clear.

there is nothing that “requires” us to sign up to more and more services or for that matter, to follow 1,000 blogs or 10,000 twitterers. i say ignore 99% of the noise (i.e. friendfeed) and concentrate on the conversations that matter to us. conversation will survive, believe me, conversation will continue to be supported by technology, and technology (and money-hungry) enthusiasts will try to continue to want to “improve” or simply take over the conversation. nothing new, really, it’s similar with commercials on TV and sports events. love hockey and don’t want to be interrupted for a beer commercial mid-puck? go to the little leagues. love conversation across timezones and continents? sit back, ignore the hype around new apps, keep listening and keep saying smart, funny and kind things.

i know, it’s easier said than done. on a personal level, i just had to apologize to a friend for inviting him to one of those naymz. don’t know what bit me. on a wider level, many people’s business strategies depend on keeping up with all of this. that’s too bad. about two years ago, kathy sierra wrote one of her beautiful pieces about the hopelessness of keeping up - in a slightly different context but the principle still holds.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - April 13, 2008 at 08:32 am PDT

@Isabella I think you have missed what I was trying to say. It has nothing to do with keeping up with everything. Shyftr pulls in the entirety of a feed (say, Profy) and moves the conversation to that service. As the author, there would be comments on what I had to say that I have no idea are being made. FriendFeed is similar, but at least doesn’t pull the entire content in. Other applications, I’m sure, are waiting in the wings to do just the same thing, and Robert Scoble thinks that’s just fine.

I have a problem with being shut out of conversation I started or contributed to because I elect to not spend all my time keeping up with every new app that does the same thing.
Conversationed Out - April 13, 2008 at 08:40 am PDT

I can barely keep up with all the blogs that are out there. I don’t have the time to read 20 blogs on a daily basis. THere’s no way I’m going to join 50 sites just to keep up with the conversations about the conversations on those blogs.
isabella mori - April 13, 2008 at 08:50 am PDT

cyndy, maybe i have - i haven’t used shyftr, for reasons that are probably obvious to you, so i can’t comment intelligently on it - but i think i get the gist.

i still don’t understand what the big problem is. yes, i understand what the small problem is - services like shyftr take part of the conversation elsewhere. so what? i can choose not to go there. again i’m going to take a real-life example: people have real life conversations with me, to my face, and then they’ll go home and talk about me and the conversation they had with me with others.

so why not forget about it and concentrate on the part of the conversation that you can comfortably take part in? it’s not as if these aggregators take the actual post (or tweet, or whatever it is) and erase it from its original site.

if i sound like an old fuddy duddy, it’s because i am. i’ve watched this “technology will destroy language/conversation/relationships/fill-in-the-blanks” debate for 38 years now and all in all, things just keep on ticking along
Leslie Poston - April 13, 2008 at 03:21 pm PDT

@RSS Confusion Abounds: I adore it when people recognize my work and want to share it with their friends. I adore it even more when they take the time to also comment or email and start a conversation with me, at the source. I try to make a point, when I give someone a Stumble discovery or a DIGG submission so that others can read them, to let them know on the blog that I liked their article enough to do so.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - April 14, 2008 at 06:35 am PDT

@Conversationed Out I agree. We are already so pressed for time, and I find it highly ironic that not long after the bitchmeme was about how horrible it is for bloggers having to work around the clock, everyone decides it’s okay to move conversation all over the place, creating more work for the bloggers.

@Isabella It reduces the amount of conversation on the originating site. I was skimming my latest FriendFeed email this morning and I saw three pages of comments directed to a blog author on the service. On Twitter, a lot of people respond with an @Profy, which actually goes to Svetlana, when they actually mean to address a comment to me specifically. I had to set an alert to bring anything mentioning Profy into my RSS reader just to follow it. In some cases, it had to do with a linking or spelling mistake in an article, which obviously, I’d want to correct as soon as I possibly could.

I also think that in many respects, technology has altered relationships in undesireable ways. I’m one of the very few people that I know who lives in the same city they grew up in, with a large expanded family around. My husband barely knows most of his first cousins, which is a foreign concept to me when my children see the majority of their third cousins at least once a year at the holidays. I definitely think that the increased dependence on online social networks is a result of the nomadic tendencies of the culture that we didn’t see to this extent 30 years ago.

@Leslie Agreed. There is a difference between something that drives traffic back to a site (which Digg and StumbleUpon do) and something that allows you to read all the content on another site. How many of us actually follow a link back to the original if we’ve already read the entire article?
Web Trends - April 14, 2008 at 09:52 am PDT

The Splintering of Social Web Discussions…

There was some talk over the weekend about how discussions on the social web, particularly discussions on blogs, are becoming more and more splintered. Services such as FriendFeed and Shyftr allow people to post comments, which means comments on a pa…
bobafett - April 14, 2008 at 11:09 am PDT

the starter of the conversation does own the conversation

get over it

people want to open source everything — but when it comes to their blog traffice they want to keep it closed

sad
Roger - April 14, 2008 at 11:51 am PDT

I wonder if we’re all missing the point… Isn’t it the commoditization of information that is at the heart of the problem? Ten years ago, if you didn’t have access to a library you missed all the information stored in its books. And in any case, you couldn’t read every book, obviously. And of course, copyright was much easier to define, so you couldn’t just pull content and claim it as your own.

Since information is becoming more and more formalized as a commodity, it is proliferating wildly — as you’d expect in a capitalist society. Combined with the role of technology to put more and more information into more and more hands (or heads), it’s inevitable that the rate of information creation will far outstrip anyone’s ability to absorb it or even track it. Does that make the technology useless? Not at all. In fact, the situation returns power to the individual. And that is the beauty. We each (if we have access to the technology) have the power to choose the apps we use, to track the info we’re interested in, right? That selective effect will ensure that the technological applications will evolve to optimal solutions. Crappy ones will die off and the best will survive. Over time, the technology will consolidate to the point where it is a seamless part of our lives and conversations like this will become obsolete, as necessary and interesting as they are now of course.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - April 14, 2008 at 01:18 pm PDT

@bobafett What does this have to do with Open Source? The two are completely different models, and comparing them is like apples and oranges.

@Roger If I honestly believed crappy applications died off, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t still be hobbled with Internet Explorer.

I think there are several issues at play here. One is that it depends on people knowing about everywhere the conversation is breaking off. I have friends with blogs whose technical knowledge amounts to emailing and logging into their WordPress install to post. They still subscribe to blogs via email because RSS is way over their heads. Now you are asking them to pick and choose services they aren’t even aware of? There is also a limitation to the amount of time any person can spend tracking the conversation. I’m VERY interested in the responses that people send to @Profy on Twitter assuming I get them, but it also adds to my time debt having to pull them as a feed and then sift through them to see what pertains to me. Same with FriendFeed and a host of other things.
Roger Benningfield - June 27, 2008 at 10:57 am PDT

Cyndy: I’ve been a long-time critic of what passes for “community” in the blogging world: a bunch of non-threaded, hit-and-run one-liner comments spat out by unknown entities and edited capriciously by random bloggers who lack the temperament for leading discussions. *That’s* noise.

And while Friendfeed is non-threaded and limits comment length, it does a better job than most blogs at the other bits… allowing everyone (not just a blog owner) to establish a persistent identity within the scope of the community, taking absolute control out of the hands of bloggers, and keeping self-selected groups in ongoing contact. To me, FF (or at least the concepts it represents) is simply killing off the bits of Web 2.0 that were broken-by-design in the first place.
David Sim - June 28, 2008 at 01:54 am PDT

I find the FriendFeed comments to be of relatively high quality, and it does drive a lot of traffic to my blog.

I’d like to see a Wordpress add-in to capture the comments on FF and automatically add them to the blog - best of both worlds. FF comments get lost pretty quickly, but that way they would get preserved with the article.

Problem not 100% solved, but it would help.
David Sim - June 28, 2008 at 03:45 am PDT

Following up my previous comment… http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/friendfeed-comments/

I’ll be checking it out. I should add, I found this blog post through FriendFeed, so it has a positive output for bloggers.
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