Flashforward

I picture myself in the future. My hair is gray even though I’m in my 30s. I’m telling stories to teen-agers about the early days of the web; that strange transitional period where it morphed from a nerd haven into a mainstream platform that all people used.

“Oh yeah, it was wild. Every page had a comments box at the bottom, where any old jerk could write whatever they wanted! It turned each creative person into a public servant, building this communal discussion forum where all men had an equal voice. Yup… some called it ‘community’, others called it ‘democracy’… what’s that? Eh? …. NO! No, no, none of us realized we were a bunch of filthy communists. It didnt’ quite click that we had been negating our property rights, by default, on almost every single site, for ten straight years.

— jakoblodwick

Man oh Man, things are changing, this is exciting. So I’ve been in love with 3 services over the past 45 days: Seesmic, Twitter, and Tumblr.  On Wednesday, I discovered the link between the 3 services. Same medium of communication. Seesmic is video to video, want to leave me a text comment? To bad! Twitter and Tumblr are the same way. This means people need to put the same effort into the conversation to be there. Yes, the service uses the internet to make it easier to find and get to the conversation but it also makes you put in effort to stay there. Anyone can participate, but the level of required effort will weed out the less interesting people. This is about half-right. I  explain it in this seesmic video: 

Thanks to Jakob Lodwick (who has been doing some thinking on this issue) I realized the other truth that goes hand in hand with this new system. Ownership of your comments. I always comment on blogs under my (real) full name, but it’s still a rarity that people who know me see those comments when looking for content I’ve created. Those comments aren’t really “owned” by me, they have been given to the material I’m commenting on. I’ve “taken-back” those comments by publishing an RSS feed of all the articles I comment on, but it’s an ugly hack and not many people use it. With services that require you to create something of equivalent form they force you to own it. If I twitter a reply to a friend, it still shows up when you view my stream of tweets (you can choose to view it or not, but it’s still there), same with Seesmic, same with Tumblr. Now you alone own your thoughts, that’s a good thing. Comments are published with similar weight as other content you’ve written, because everything is your thought. This “stream of consciousness” is too much for some people, but it’s the way things are moving as we are becoming more adept and applying personal filters. These new systems are revolutionizing how comments work. It’s what Trackbacks should have been to blogs. This is the next step in digital expression, and it’s important.

Comments are dying, and the art of commenting is better off because of that. (I couldn’t bring myself to write “comments are dead, long live comments” but I wanted to.

Also, check out Jakob’s thoughts on the new Tumblr Notes feature, which I agree is really cool.