JUNE 30, 2009

Threading Our Conversations

Tweetboard is a new application for Twitter that creates “micro forum” discussions on a website by displaying tweets about a topic in a threaded conversation format. It’s still being tested, but from what I’ve seen of the application, it seems like it could be a smart way to add some depth and convenience to blog discussions.

The best applications often see the weakest parts of a service and figure out a simple solution - in this case, the creators of Tweetboard probably saw an opportunity to give tweets some more context by helping users have focused discussions on websites that are connected with their Twitter accounts. Twitter is, after all, a stream of information, which makes it difficult to visualize and track a conversation, especially for archival purposes. Tweetboard allows commenters to publish their comments as a tweet with a link to the location of the Tweetboard conversation. This effectively advertises the conversation in the larger Twitter community and helps drive more traffic to the site using Tweetboard.

With the advent of blogging and microblogging, we’ve seen conversations take the form of comments sections, @ replies and hashtags. Although each method has its own strengths, the threaded discussion format widely adopted by most forums and message boards is arguably the best at managing multi-user conversations. Tweetboard strives to bring more organization to Twitter conversations by adapting the threaded format.

As new web services are developed, we are given new avenues through which to communicate. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to oversaturation and social network fatigue - it is difficult to keep up with multiple profiles on separate sites. However, there has also been a trend towards open profiles. More sites are opening up their API to developers who can explore ways to share information between sites. As these applications form links between social networks and other sites, we get more value out of our online activities. With the link between a blog/website and Twitter through Tweetboard, I can offer my thoughts in a comments section on a blog and then have the conversation fed to my Twitter account, where the subject is then added to the Twitter community’s ever-changing and current mess of topics. Imagine how much more interconnected Twitter’s trending keywords can be if user conversations on other sites are also incorporated: we would probably be able to view busy, active conversations across a greater portion of the internet.