tools for the toolmakers

i really appreciated danah’s critique of the feed aggregation fad at web 2.0 last week. i had noticed intuitively some difference between blogs that have commentary and criticism and the more dairy like personal or intimate content. but i hadn’t thought about a correlation between those and the frequency of posting and comment, or the differences in use between blogs across that spectrum. so then i scanned some generic youth blogs and sure enough the comments in each entry often looked like an IM capture - with mostly social banter back and forth, meaningless to someone who didn’t already know the people and slang of that clique. just a few data points, but very interesting to draw the comparison between email/IM and the different types of blogs.

i wonder if there’s a pace which defines the qualitative difference. the IM crowd interacting at a more frequent pace, the email crowd slower, more thoughtful. the former more interested in frequency and immediacy of contact as a currency of friendship and the latter more interested in the quality of the contact as the currency. seems to also be a difference of interruptive versus postponable in the two mediums.

as i’ve gotten older, it does seem like time constraints make it harder for me to have frequent contact with my circle of friends or interruptive communication so we check in periodically and tend to have more thoughtful sharing of what’s going on; certainly compared to ‘wassup?’ kinds of quick phone calls or IM messages. i’m also used to friends increasingly asking, “is this a good time to talk?” but maybe my circle of friends is just getting stuffy.

i’ve been spending more time lately thinking about how people share, send, and publish digital photos and files lately, because of my focus at work. but sent files always include messaging about them, as a form of context. sometimes the context is just framing the content (e.g. here are pictures from my trip to hawaii), sometimes it’s a request for commitment or confirmation of agreement (e.g. please review this document by friday, or here are the proofs please typeset these)

this would seem to have implications for photo sharing or music sharing, but i’m not sure if the interfaces would be different as much as the requirements. if the comparison with blogs follows, then IM style photo sharing is much more along the lines of just ‘hey, check this, dude’ and then expecting similar responses. i wonder if commenting systems or feedback/rating would then be better if they were interruptive and immediate (through an IM client or another running service) compared to delayed in email. that would be interesting to test. what do you think?

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