We like our media in small chunks and diverse, a sort of fruit salad, or so the common wisdom goes. But what adult with a job past 26 years old can handle a thousand loose threads of conversation bombarding him or her at the most unlikely hours. Adrian Chan believes that the solution is to find the right methods of reaggregation, new platforms of bringing back together that one great blooming, buzzing confusion (to use William James’ famous phrase) which our life has become into an orderly universe of meaning.
The primary goals of interaction models used around the flow involve separating content from the conversational stream, extracting meta data where possible, assigning categories and embedding within content structures and navigational systems. Then the social challenge becomes making it accessible search, browse, and categorization and making it socially interesting lists, rankings, votes, etc.The disadvantage this older page-based method of social experience has with respect to the recent conversational trend is of course that it’s at a remove from the user. The factors that compel us to talk are not available here. Attention is not paid to people directly, but indirectly through means of content. The advantage, however, is of course in the many ways already developed for organizing content and making it available for re-use within other contexts.
via Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Activity Streams: Content and Flow via RRW, our favorite blog.