Comments | sandhawke: who wants to talk about

sandhawke

who wants to talk about

Nov 12, 2010 15:10

Is there an effective technique for finding out which of my friends, or even friends of friends, wants to chat about some particular topic I feel like talking about?

... without bothering everyone else.

Comments 8

wotw November 12 2010, 20:12:29 UTC

I think --- if you're comfortable being this public --- that a quick
LJ post asking "Who wants to talk about topic X?" would not be
bothersome to anyone.

sandhawke November 12 2010, 20:28:17 UTC

Well, it may be the best option we've got, but it has two failings:

1. I really don't want to bother folks with it. If it were once a month, sure, but if it's twice a day, ... not so much. In general, if I post to everyone, I feel like I need to actually contribute something, at least in a large fraction of the posts. (That's more so on my blog or twitter, where most of my subscribers are not [yet] my friends, but still....)

2. Lots of my friends and friends-of-friends don't read my LJ (or facebook or blog or twitter).

I want something that balances the social closeness with the topic closeness. It seems right now like I can either find a forum of people who like me, or a forum of people who like the topic, but I want something that balances the two.

concrete November 12 2010, 20:44:01 UTC

I think lj/fb/twitter one liners would be perfect.

Ps: I'm thinking about sbir grants and nonprofits and tax advisors at the moment. You?

entrope November 12 2010, 21:21:28 UTC

Talk to Lauren about the sbir grants! She'll be here Monday afternoon.

crschmidt November 12 2010, 22:35:29 UTC

*handwaves about rdf/social network graphs/topic interest statements*

sandhawke November 13 2010, 05:07:59 UTC

Yeah, that was the solution some of us sketched out in 1988 (give or take some details of RDF), but, you know, maybe someone has solved it by now? I guess if they had, I would know about it, since one of the attributes of the solution would have to be that practically everyone used it.

What do you think about other commenters saying "I think lj/fb/twitter one liners would be perfect" ? Am I just caught it technology-driven tunnel vision to think that is inadequate?

crschmidt November 13 2010, 18:23:49 UTC

I think Twitter is especially appropriate for that type of thing, though Facebook has the benefit of centralized ability to respond (tracking a thread of conversation on twitter is much harder). For things like this, I would probably use those mechanisms. LJ feels less appropriate to me as I personally use it, because I like to have more 'substance' in what I write on LJ, but I don't think there's anything wrong with a couple of DanC-style 'hacker mode' posts on twitter or facebook a day; The type of communication that it enables is actually probably the kind of thing that most people would be expecting from Twitter or Facebook style status updates ( ... )

Two thoughts drwex November 15 2010, 22:06:58 UTC

Lenny Foner's PhD thesis was more or less on this topic. I don't think it ever went very far. He was most interested in the privacy and security aspects of exposing your interests to friends-of-friends and possibly further, without necessarily compromising yourself.

That said, I do think Twitter works for this, as do things like Google chat or Facebook status lines.