question about commenting

[Juan Luis Chulilla]

Hi all,

For our community of sharebros, sharing was one of the legs of our strange but beloved table. The other was commenting, and commenting fulfill all the experience: the same people who enjoyed the contents shared by other usually make good points about them

As sharebro project is going to be something like a glue between platforms in order to achieve commonality of sharing, Do you think it's possible to do something like that (intercomment?) between platforms?

If it is the case, all the sharecommenting would be multiplatform. Quite rewarding IMHO.

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[Emmanuel Pire]

In a perfect world no one would have authority on the sharebro service. Instead, an addition to RSS is developed and all services willing to provide this service can do it. Would be just great. But I can't figure out comments in that situation. if I use "sharer service" A, you use B and we follow each other. so far so good but when you comment, how will our 2 services sync so i can read it and reply ?

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Emmanuel Pire
Web development
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[Juan Luis Chulilla]

Wouldn't be possible to define a comment thread as a intershareable feed?

I am using sharer service A, and you use B, following your example. We follow each other, and I comment a content you share. Where I comment it? Maybe service A can create a comment thread and service B feed its comment from it

[Alex Chaffee]

So may I rephrase your idea?

A comment thread could be a new feed, spawned from and focused on a source post but with its own lifecycle and posts, each post with its own author, date, title etc. 

I like the recursive efficiency and elegance of that design. It would mean you get certain features like +1ing or reblogging a comment "for free". 

My current comment plan is not fully formed. We could use Disqus or Facebook Comments or G+ API. Syncing between various comment systems is hard but probably doable, at least in an 80%-kludgey way. And I agree cross-system commenting's a great feature. 

Sent from my iPhone

[Juan Luis Chulilla]

Well, disqus is close to the idea. I use it in my blog, but it is not intershareable: You use your identity in disqus for commenting in each disqus-enabled site, but the discussion itself belongs to each "physical" site, not to a feed. Besides, disqus itself is not a desirable model, since they cannot be interested in interoperability and independence. They are a cloud service, and they want you to use their services in a "silk-forceful way"

Until now, a conversation belongs to a site, no to the participants. This is silly if you traduce it in offline terms: can you imagine a conversation that belongs to a pub? Ok, you remember the pub, the ales you drank, but the conversation was between all the participants.

Therefore, if there is a way to offer the possibility of making your conversations truly yours (not only independizing it from sites and cloudy services, but assuring you that you are going to be able to recover it although service changes... like we suffer with Google :) ), our sharing communities will evolve into a partially new and awesome reality.

Why partially? because with email groups you can save the threads locally. Since almost 40 years ago. BUT, and there is a big objection, email is not intended for conversations between more than a few participants. We all used mailing list because of the lack of alternatives, but we are in 2011.

Independence of sharing is really great, and I want to thank you for all your efforts. But independence of commenting would enrich the experience and giving users all the power about their interactions. A good democratic and civic tool, if you look beyond the tool itself

[Emmanuel Pire]

making the comments a RSS is one sweet idea, and indeed very open. they won't shut down RSS, disqus could shut down.
The only thing I can't figure out with multiple sharer services: who will host the comment feed ?
the first comment get to create the rss feed ? or maybe they could all have their version, and pull updates from other sharer as well.
but what about i'm a sharing service, but there are 26 others. will i have to fetch them all to gather all comments ?

[Juan Luis Chulilla]

Maybe the user who launch the discussion is going to host the discussion in the service, and the rest of the services could refresh the discussion from its RSS feed. As you say, if sharing services are federated and are dozens of them, fetch all the comments would be not efficient.

Maybe the basic design could be something like this

<discussion>

<ID>chain</ID>

<LastTimestamp>1320834202</LastTimestamp>

<from>Wanderer</from>

<Timestamp>1320833959</Timestamp>

<body>chain</body>

.

.

.

</discussion>

I find that the main limitation of this RSS-based discussion is that it is a push, not pull, design. Participants would depend on refreshening frequence. However, I don't believe that it is a significant problem: under my experience, most of the discussions based on sharing contents are strongly asynchronous and people don't grew tired if the responses come "late".

Some users could find a particular discussion enough attractive in order to want registering it. As a RSS element, that discussion could be registered with no effort :)

[Les Orchard]

On 11/9/11 5:29 AM, Juan Luis Chulilla wrote:

> I find that the main limitation of this RSS-based discussion is that it
> is a push, not pull, design. Participants would depend on refreshening
> frequence. However, I don't believe that it is a significant problem:
> under my experience, most of the discussions based on sharing contents
> are strongly asynchronous and people don't grew tired if the responses
> come "late".

This doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Polling RSS feeds is the
foundation, but there are also things like rssCloud[1] and
PubSubHubbub[2] which enhance the process with notifications.

[1]: http://rsscloud.org/walkthrough.html
[2]: http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

They have slight differences, but the basic flow is this:

* Author publishes a feed with new content
* Author pings a hub server
* Hub server relays pings to interested subscribers
* Subscribers either fetch the feed earlier than usual, or get the item
straight from the ping data.

So, a subscriber who might otherwise only refresh a feed every hour will
instead get the new item data within seconds or minutes.

--
m...@lmorchard.com
http://decafbad.com
{web,mad,computer} scientist

[Juan Luis Chulilla]

If there is a functional, distributed environment for commenting, even cloud services would be more palatable: some users (like me) wouldn't feel chained to the service. Besides, it wouldn't matter if some of our pals decide to use plus or other "syndicatable" service, since we could conversate anyways.

if a distributed environment allows users to sharing and commenting comments independently of the service, it would be a great and welcome innovation. Think about your experiences with forum: most of them are speciallized in a reduced set of topics. On the other side, there are Social Networks: people are in these for interacting with their acquaitances. Finally we had google reader (and buzz): an environment in which interesting and motivating contents where central, both for sharing and for discussing about them.

There are some attempts to replicate this experience (for instance, hivemined, and maybe newsblur). However, distributing and bridging the experience would assure to us sharers that there would not possible to interrupt again the experience no matter what happens with our service.

I plan to test hivemined ASAP it is ready. Some of my sharing pals decided to go with plus, and their contents and discussions were quite interesting. It would be awesome to continue or even expand the prior experience

--

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http://groups.google.com/group/sharebro for archives and options

[alex kessinger]

I think looking at the salmon protocol might be helpful.
http://www.salmon-protocol.org/

[Les Orchard]

On 11/9/11 11:59 AM, alex kessinger wrote:
> I think looking at the salmon protocol might be helpful.
> http://www.salmon-protocol.org/

+1 to that, too!

[Juan Luis Chulilla]

Thanks for sharing, dude!

Looks like other people has done the work already!

Would it be possible to integrate it with/into sharebro?

--
The Sharebro Google Group: for http://sharebro.org and related development
http://groups.google.com/group/sharebro for archives and options

[alex kessinger]

Well the biggest problem with the salmon protocol is that you need
everyone in the system to use it. It's possible that we could convince
someone like newsblur to use it, or write it ourselves into newsblur.
So that any conversation on newsblur could find it's way back to
sharebro.org, but if you left a comment on a given blog, unless that
blog supported the salmon protocol it wouldn't work.

This was kind of my point. Distributed comments are hard its going to
be more of a social engineering task then a software one. I am up for
the challange though.

I think the first step is creating a way to host a disscussion that
can be contributed to from many different places. Almost like disqus,
but instead of being connected to a site, it's connected to a piece of
content.

Actually, you might be able to hack disqus to do something like this.

[Juan Luis Chulilla]

But if we (I hope that you don't mind me to use "we", although I am not a developer) produce an alternative inside sharebro.org for distributing comments, it will happen the same: unless the other services adopt sharebro's option, there won't be commenting back.

The diference between sharing contents and distributing comments is that sharing is unidirectional, while distributing comments is multidirectional: all for all.

If you produce a disqus-esque alternative, maybe in the future it will be too costly to interoperate with salmon. For instance, PubSubHubBub was not visible until Google adopted it for reader, and I think that nowadays is beyond discussion, right?

You have raised a serious question with social engineering, and I have a potential answer for that: If you say to site maintainers and bloggers that they are going to be able to recover the conversations that they are losing because of people that are commenting their contents in sites like reader or in social networks, they could not resist. Disqus is a good service (I use it), but for my blog I frequently maintain 2 covnersations: inside the blog and with my sharebros.

[Alex Chaffee]

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Juan Luis Chulilla <chul...@gmail.com> wrote:

But if we (I hope that you don't mind me to use "we", although I am not a developer) produce an alternative inside sharebro.org for distributing comments,

 

Ideas are more valuable than code. Consider yourself "we". :-)

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 7:28 PM, alex kessinger <void...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well the biggest problem with the salmon protocol is that you need
everyone in the system to use it. 

 

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Juan Luis Chulilla <chul...@gmail.com> wrote:

it will happen the same: unless the other services adopt sharebro's option, there won't be commenting back.

Not necessarily. It's possible to develop an active syncing system, as a bridge between any two comment systems (e.g. one that's distributed and one that's isolated). 

So let's say Disqus doesn't play ball. That's OK. If someone posts a comment on a sharebro-tracked item, we could push it to Disqus, and likewise, poll for  (or get pushed) additions. There are some tricky but solvable problems like avoiding duplicates and preserving order and author identity. I bet we could get an 80% solution without too much effort.

Even if Disqus didn't have a formal API (which it does) we could get its content through the URLs it publishes in its JS widgets. Posting would be trickier but could be done with OAuth or a clunkier alternative (like, ugh, saving a user's disqus username and password and posting on their behalf, eeu gross).

For instance, PubSubHubBub was not visible until Google adopted it for reader, and I think that nowadays is beyond discussion, right?

I don't know exactly what you mean by that. I still consider Google a vital part of the Internet and still have many Googler and ex-Googler friends and trust their motives. Lots of people working in Google are "good guys", and the "bad guys" are more like the scorpion in that fable: we can trust them to be true to their nature.

Disqus is a good service (I use it), but for my blog I frequently maintain 2 covnersations: inside the blog and with my sharebros.

 

To clarify, do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing?

I personally tend to think that more unity is better, but I see the value in having separate comment threads on the same source. E.g. just recently I went to post a joke directly as a comment on my friend Gerry's blog since I know he and his usual blog readers would appreciate the snark; in Reader (that is, pre-apocalypse) I probably wouldn't have made that comment since my Reader sharebros would think I was just being a knee-jerk liberal and not see the humor and go off on some libertarian tangent about the original post. Or something.

And lots of people felt an "illusion of privacy" in their Reader Party comment threads. They could let their hair down and say sarcastic or silly or vulgar things because they knew (or thought) that their boss or their mom or their ex would never read it.

(Of course, most of that privacy really was an illusion, but there was a barrier to entry: to see a comment Alice posted on Bob's share, Charlie would have to be following Bob, which makes it less likely -- but not at all impossible -- for Charlie to stalk Alice.)

--
Alex Chaffee - al...@stinky.com
http://alexchaffee.com
http://twitter.com/alexch

[Juan Luis Chulilla]

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 10:01 PM, Alex Chaffee <al...@stinky.com> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Juan Luis Chulilla <chul...@gmail.com> wrote:

But if we (I hope that you don't mind me to use "we", although I am not a developer) produce an alternative inside sharebro.org for distributing comments,

 

Ideas are more valuable than code. Consider yourself "we". :-)

Thanks a lot, mr. I can contribute with my perspective: In the last 2 years I have been conducting an ethnographic research of digital empowerment of communities, and I have had to fight once and again with subtle, hard to detect but strong barriers for the adoption of social software solutions. Of course I don't want to talk ex-cathedra or something like that, but I can choose experience with people instead of theory as much of my colleagues do :)

  

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 7:28 PM, alex kessinger <void...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well the biggest problem with the salmon protocol is that you need
everyone in the system to use it. 

 

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Juan Luis Chulilla <chul...@gmail.com> wrote:

it will happen the same: unless the other services adopt sharebro's option, there won't be commenting back.

Not necessarily. It's possible to develop an active syncing system, as a bridge between any two comment systems (e.g. one that's distributed and one that's isolated). 

So let's say Disqus doesn't play ball. That's OK. If someone posts a comment on a sharebro-tracked item, we could push it to Disqus, and likewise, poll for  (or get pushed) additions. There are some tricky but solvable problems like avoiding duplicates and preserving order and author identity. I bet we could get an 80% solution without too much effort.

"Where" would that person  comment? using a commenting feature of sharebro?

Let's build a case: Imagine that a user share an interesting content, a post of a blog for instance. Sharebro is going to distribute that sharing between all the lists of people who follow that user. Some of them want to discuss the topic, because it is so inspiring... and there is an asimmetry if I have understand correctly the proposal: sharing would be distributed from the very beginning, but commenting would be partially centralized in disqusharebro, and bridged to other services

Am I right? 

Even if Disqus didn't have a formal API (which it does) we could get its content through the URLs it publishes in its JS widgets. Posting would be trickier but could be done with OAuth or a clunkier alternative (like, ugh, saving a user's disqus username and password and posting on their behalf, eeu gross).

I see that in the first moments it would be difficult to achieve that big gamers such disqus adopt something like salmon. Maybe salmon would be perceived as a menace to their business model, since salmon's interoperability would make disqus looks as less necessary to its clients, such as important blogs and sites who pay for the premium and über-premium services. But it could works in the opposite way: if Disqus offer attractive options for their clients, salmon adoption would attract or grab conversations maintained inside other services outside of the client's site.

But think about Disqus and Plus: some people will comment that shared item with one service and some with the other one. I don't get how both conversations could be bridged seamlessly. 

The problem is even worse. Let me explain briefly: when Google made its sad announcement, we raised hastily a temporary solution using posterous for sharing and discussing from reader's feed. One of my sharebro pals (who don't find plus as outrageous as myself and is there at this moment) said to me that we were closing the walls of our garden, and he was right. 

In the last years, our local sharebro community grew very slowly, I guess that with a mechanism similar to yours: one day we met a new person who made interesting comments on a post which had been shared by one of our sharebros. We started to follow his or her feed and we got used to share and discuss with that person too. If we concentrate ourselves in a place without this mechanism, our community probably would stagnate and finally freeze.

sharebro.org will recover part of this renewing mechanism, the sharing part. But this mechanism won't be totally functional without the discussion part: I discover a good part of my sharebros discussing with them about interesting topics

 

For instance, PubSubHubBub was not visible until Google adopted it for reader, and I think that nowadays is beyond discussion, right?

I don't know exactly what you mean by that. I still consider Google a vital part of the Internet and still have many Googler and ex-Googler friends and trust their motives. Lots of people working in Google are "good guys", and the "bad guys" are more like the scorpion in that fable: we can trust them to be true to their nature.

I didn't mean anything bad about Google with this. Ok, I'm quite upset because the bold and clumsy way of conducting changes, but it is not "a cause for fighting". I would find childish to fight google because of this reader affaire. If the company wouldn't respect my confidence is comparable to the same situation in a human relation: it's not useful to fight against such fact. It's prefereable to distance your self and take care of what actually matters to you. 

I don't mean any criticism but a fact: Google adopted PSHB for their own purposes, but after that there was no choice: the difference between a push and a pull model for retrieving feeds is just too big. Therefore, if salmon protocol is adopted by important and popular sites, there will no choice for disqus, plus and facebook. More on this immediatelly

Disqus is a good service (I use it), but for my blog I frequently maintain 2 covnersations: inside the blog and with my sharebros.

 

To clarify, do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing?

I personally tend to think that more unity is better, but I see the value in having separate comment threads on the same source. E.g. just recently I went to post a joke directly as a comment on my friend Gerry's blog since I know he and his usual blog readers would appreciate the snark; in Reader (that is, pre-apocalypse) I probably wouldn't have made that comment since my Reader sharebros would think I was just being a knee-jerk liberal and not see the humor and go off on some libertarian tangent about the original post. Or something.

 

As I said, I would find very compelling a protocol, platform, service or whatever that let me "recover" the conversation that is generated from the contents I write. On the one hand, it is more difficult to maintain two conversations about the same topic at the same time. On the other hand, if all the conversation is connected to my blogs, it would enrich the results and experiences for all the users. And of course, "recover" wouldn't mean "grab", because users would be still commenting outside of my site.

But you are also right about the possibility of maintaining two discussion threads about the same topic. Your example is quite graphic, although there are other methods for disconnecting conversation if you want to do that, using email for instance. My point is that a unified conversation would maximice the discovering of people to follow, avoiding the stagnation I mentioned above. Think about reader: in the good ole times, conversation was unified inside reader (and buzz): there were not other relevant content social curation services for us sharebros. In our days, there are going to be different relevant services if we are lucky and the alternatives take off. Therefore, we will need to fight stagnation of communities.

I'm not sure if my point is totally clear :|

And lots of people felt an "illusion of privacy" in their Reader Party comment threads. They could let their hair down and say sarcastic or silly or vulgar things because they knew (or thought) that their boss or their mom or their ex would never read it.

(Of course, most of that privacy really was an illusion, but there was a barrier to entry: to see a comment Alice posted on Bob's share, Charlie would have to be following Bob, which makes it less likely -- but not at all impossible -- for Charlie to stalk Alice.)

--
Alex Chaffee - al...@stinky.com
http://alexchaffee.com
http://twitter.com/alexch

I'm not sure about how hard would be to implement salmon or other equivalent solution for unifying and not only bridging comments. Maybe it's too hard to implement both objetives. But I am afraid that if implementation of salmon is delayed too much, maybe the opportunity for implementing it will be vanished.

IMHO, these days are overwhelmingly exciting. After our reader idol fall to the ground, we suddenly realice that things can be better done, that other options are viable and desirable. We were so used to do our sharebro things that most of us (me included) don't ask ourselves about our means for maintaing our activity. We are now with our eyes wide open, evaluating possibilities and motivated for building a damn good solution and share the Good News :).

Cheers, 

Juan