If you think about it, you can codify every type of online conversation by 3 key elements: From, To, and the “view”.

For example:
-blogs/tweets are from an individual, to the public. The view is all outbound messages of this type from a particular author.
-Facebook wall is from individual, to individual. The view is all inbound messages to a particular recipient. (btw this is why I think Twitter is nothing new, it's the “reverse wall”)
- Message board posts are from an individual, to a thread, and the view is all inbound messages to that thread.

So you see, a lot of our conversation is fragmented over many seeming disparate systems, but ultimately they are ridiculously similar and it's a shame we haven't integrated them yet. (btw, FriendFeed “aggregates”, not “integrates”…it's a whole other league)

If you think about it, you can codify every type of online conversation by 3 key elements: From, To, and the “view”.

For example:
-blogs/tweets are from an individual, to the public. The view is all outbound messages of this type from a particular author.
-Facebook wall is from individual, to individual. The view is all inbound messages to a particular recipient. (btw this is why I think Twitter is nothing new, it's the “reverse wall”)
- Message board posts are from an individual, to a thread, and the view is all inbound messages to that thread.

So you see, a lot of our conversation is fragmented over many seeming disparate systems, but ultimately they are ridiculously similar and it's a shame we haven't integrated them yet. (btw, FriendFeed “aggregates”, not “integrates”…it's a whole other league)

http://mymemestream.blogspot.com/2008/05/i-thin...

Cheers.

But Claimid is insignificant in this conversation and post. It's just a very handy shortcut I can give people to find out who I am (when I'm not anonymous) online. It's the very same reason people aggregate their friends' actions from different sites on FriendFeed – the different aspects to someone – their full context – are interesting and informative. You get a better picture of me when, in addition to reading my blog posts, you see what others have written about me, when you see how I've interacted with people on *their* blogs, when you can follow my thoughts and open conversations on twitter, etc.

Identity is and has been for a long time fragmented across a lot of sites. Even specific aspects of your personality have been fragmented, for example your comments on lots of different sites and on your blog. But what could happen if Disqus et al turn the blogosphere inside out by becoming conversation platforms is that at least that aspect of you have been 'defragged' – you bring more context with you to places like this when you leave a comment linking to all your other comments.

besides, a blog is what you SAY. A lot of th

The rest of my post was wondering what could be built around a defragged, aggregated aspect of your identity and those of your friends. Facebook built a place to socialise around your profiles and those of your friends. What about a conversation social network? Highly plausible….

Why did you use Claim my id as the place to assert your identity. Isn't a blog the best place to assert this kind of thing? In my option the best blogs do aa amzing job of being a central repository of a person thoughts and ideas and cannot be beatenby pro forma platforms.

-Jitendra

“And I particularly like his observation that anytime there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:

1. Who you think you are
2. Who you think the other person is
3. Who you think the other person thinks you are
4. Who the other person thinks he/she is
5. Who the other person thinks you are
6. Who the other person thinks you think he/she is

All this meaning that you have no actual control as Pete wants in his comment.

But if it does, it further confirms my viewpoint that the personal blog is an increasingly limited/redundant place to build/host your identity, versus profiles on aggregators of what you're doing web-wide. I chose to focus on discussion and dialogue, firstly because it's simple to understand the difference between doing it centralised on your own blog with trackbacks to others (blog to blog level conversation) and decentralised but aggregated conversation platforms; secondly because it lead to the second part of my post, thinking about conversations as social objects/magnets just like the minifeed on Facebook and Friendfeed are. So on both aspects you're right to bring up friendfeed. As for it being better or worse – it would be difficult to answer that objectively; it's a broader oversight of an identity but may be prone to signal/noise and river of info problems which just looking at someone's conversations, is not. Horses for courses; I guess it depends if what photos someone just flickered is relevant to what you want to know about them.

I agree to some extent that overall, online identity will be richer than mere collections of conversational inputs – for that very reason I put my web presence together at http://www.claimid.com/phbradley – but that's a bold and loose counterprivacy move which I doubt many people, for a long time still, will ever copy. But without it, I probably would not have benefited as much from the 'Fred Wilson Effect' (see my previous blog post) since it let people instantly find me on various social networks – I got some good connects that I wouldn't if it hadn't existed.

And you have to be more specific about what kind of control; control over your previously made comments is not a feature that is lacking most of these comment platforms

Totally disagree..

Blogs are the ultimate ME central because they have a killer app that can't be incorporated in other platforms: Control.

With the coming of URL to indentity mapping eg openId. I think the central spot will be become even more important, although it will evolve. Perhaps the future is the tumbleblog (a place that agregates all the me content that I acknowledge in one place).

IMO Disquss is very good but trackback is a better technology if the spam problem can be solved.