Scattered conversation is one of the biggest problem that’s haunting social media and centralized conversations can help reduce them. It’s not just the intra platform scattering of conversation that causes duplication and islands of small small conversations but the inter platform scattering too. For ex: I wrote a blog post, shared it on Kwippy and Facebook now each one of three will have discussion, so not only is replying to them differently and keeping a track is painful, maintaining context is another issue. To help the cause of having concentrated conversations kwippy even provides rss and atom feeds for comments on a kwip, which anyone can take to their blog or somewhere else and integrate with existing comments.

Thoughts ?

I agree on the basic features of Twitter. Whether it is used for a crisis or becomes a circus surely depends on the discretion of the users. It is a tool and can be misused too. A knife in a chef’s hand is a device to julienne carrots e.g. but in a killer’s hand, a device to unleash mayhem. No?

I have to disagree with likening RT to an echo chamber in the above comment. The retweet serves a purpose – of wider dissemination. That every person has networks which do not overlap or if they do, overlap only a little, the retweet allows the info to be disbursed more widely.

The rumours too were quickly quashed by people who were closer to the situation or otherwise not retweeted, both direct and implied ‘social oppobrium’ of sorts. This self-corrective element was quite impressive if one looks at the minuscule % of tweets that were rumours and were allowed to propagate wildly.

I will post something later today, to try and explain further.