Community and engagement have been the big conversations this week.
My weekend post, Filtering the web for connections through conversations, struck a chord. The comment string (some 70 plus) was an education in itself. Announcing the Disqus numbers that over 500,000 comments are posted per day on their platform was a big aha for many. A strong nod of affirmation that community really matters.
For communities and commenters, we heard loud and clear that we were not alone. Communities may be isolated on the web but commentors are a mainstream crossover category.
Engag.io’s commenting survey came out at Blog World.
Fred Wilson, Jeff Minch (JLM), William Mougayar and I presented the results. A great discussion, but the survey was less revelatory and more a confirmation of what the Disqus numbers told us. People are talking. A lot. And using conversations to find information, broaden their networks and make purchasing decisions.
Most revealing (and fun) was a Disqus-sponsored roundtable. Fred Wilson introduced the session and Ro Gupta from Disqus was the MC for the room of 50 bloggers, entrepreneurs, VCs and web thinkers. An engaged exercise in group thinking, a wish list of likes and wants about community commenting platforms.
This was obviously a partisan crowd at the tip of the commenting market. The discussion was less about looking for market proof and more about the gap between the needs of the community space and the offerings of the commenting platforms.
And gaps there are.
As powerful as these global conversations are for impacting change and as great as commenting systems like Disqus are in hosting them, comment search on one side and discovery on the other are broken. And badly.
There is a massive online population adding millions of pieces of rich conversational data daily with sophisticated platforms to encourage and organize threaded conversations.
But good luck finding, collating, editing and republishing these libraries of great content. Some bright stars like Kevin Marshall’s gawk.it are just starting to tackle this. Keep your eye on Gawk.it. It’s a garage band today, a potential rock star tomorrow.
Engag.io is breaking future ground, putting you in the middle of your conversations across the fragmented social nets. And touching on something special around conversational discovery with thoughtful tidbits from commenters you follow as discovery ring tones.
But discovery around communities generally is broken. Feels like it is being ignored for the most part by the big commenting platforms.
Following people to conversations to discover context is interesting. But it’s not the game changer.
For huge portals, discovering threads within the post’s conversational string is useful but not that exciting for the mass market of niche communities. Cross community connections is the sharp edge of the spear for the broader conversational market.
People are always searching for new connections. Whether you are in sales, marketing or a developer, your network is never big nor deep enough. The answer is not just blog rolls. Most communities have blogs but a very small percentage of blogs are truly communities.
We don’t need blog search, we need community discovery. This was echoed loud and clear this week from everywhere
The tens of millions of commenters on communities across the web want to wake up every morning and discover new conversations and communities. That’s the definition of breaking news today.
If you are interested in education, nutrition, community design or sports…you don’t want just facts or blog rolls, you want to discover the most dynamic conversations going on in communities that intersect with your interests.
We want to follow our interests where the conversations are happening sorted by the most dynamic and by topic. If you want to discover the thought leaders to engage with, follow the most active conversations.
The problem is of course, you just can’t find these conversations.
Communities are hidden under the fabric of the comments themselves. Actually communities are isolated and very laborious to find.
Imagine this, a better world.
Tomorrow morning after you clean your inbox and check in with your normal communities, you are presented with a list of trending topics by the dynamics of the conversations. The top 50 community conversations across a variety of topics you’ve opted in to follow.
Or better, with thousands of bits of information from your comments, you’ve created a map of your interests and connections. An atomic chart that defines what serendipity means to you and, like a recommendation on Amazon, you get suggestions on cool and interesting conversations that you didn’t even know you were looking for.
We are defining our interest footprint with each comment and gesture we make on Disqus and Word Press, Facebook and Twitter. It’s all there. Discovery both implicit and explicit is possible.
The fact that no one is taking this market need seriously is seriously wacko.
My friends at Disqus will be annoyed with me as I’ve been talking about this for years. @danielha knows that this is my version of tough love. I just want this. So does the market.
Community discovery is a big evolutionary step on the social web. The easier it is, the more connections will happen. The more connections that happen, the more it will drive discovery of communities that you are comfortable participating in. This is a circle of conversational goodness for all involved.
This is the link that tips the scale.
This is also the link that moves commenting platforms from smart plumbing to part of the community fabric itself. Today we thrive on the power of threaded conversations and are annoyed when alerts are broken. It’s a road that we want the potholes fixed but will keep on driving on.
Give us community search. Make it obvious that the more we communicate, the better the network gets and the more it connects us to other conversations. When commenting platforms do this, they are no longer plumbing. They become part of the pulse of the community itself.
Somebody needs to just bring this.
It’s not often that market tells us what they need to do to succeed. This is one of those times.
