Wednesday Feb 15 2006 - 12:42am
3bubbles: First Impressions
by Zach
under blogs, javascript, web
with 5 comments
As some of you probably already saw from our 3bubbles Bash, Sean, Brian and I checked out hot new Bubble2.0 beta 3bubbles. We all showed up because there was an announcement on TechCrunch when it went live. The basic idea behind the service seems to be that you can associate a unique AJAX chat room with a URL. So if you wanted to set up a chat room for every blog post you make or photo you post, you can now do it as easily as doing comments. It’s a little featureless and unstable right now, but then that’s what the beta tag is for… Oh wait, it doesn’t say “beta” anywhere. Well, it doesn’t support a lot of things I’ve gotten used to in my few painful experiences with chat rooms like a “send” key, variable text color/style and a member list that doesn’t give me an epileptic seizure. You know, the basics.
To be honest, I think the whole thing is a bad idea. I mean the basic idea is that you can have a real time conversation about a topic with other people. Unfortunately, even for a decently sized blog you’re just not going to get that many simultaneous users on a single topic. And there’s no way they’ll ever keep a chat room on topic for more than a few minutes. Even the chat linked off of TechCrunch basically degenerated into people trying to pimp their own projects or complain that GoogleTalk or Meebo was superior to 3bubbles. And then some people showed up and started writing out the alphabet one letter at a time. Basically it was like every chat room experience I’ve ever had.
The basic problem of the whole chat idea is timeliness. I know we get readers from all over the world, and having a time-insensitive method of communication is really important. I don’t want to miss out on some important insight into something someone posted because I wasn’t logged into the chat at 10:45am Hong Kong time. Comments are a great way for anyone to leave their thoughts on a matter for anyone else, anytime, to look at them.
Some of the 3bubbles guys were in the chat and dropped some hints about logging chats and transcripts being used for something, but I can’t imagine what good it’ll do. A suggestion I made to them was to allow some sort of voting system for promoting pieces of conversation to a table of contents of sorts. If Brian and I have a great idea about how to improve Yak milk production in Mongolia while reading a blog post, other people could up vote a piece of it onto a table that hot links back to it. I don’t know how feasible my idea is, but without removing at least part of the time sensitive nature of chat, I don’t think 3bubbles is going to be a very useful product. It might make for a great Bubble2.0 bust though…
1
(aβ Member)
Another important aspect of comments vs. chat is the issue of activation energy.
Writing a comment requires thought (unless it’s Markovian comment spam). You are reqired to associate a name and email with the post (requiring either responsibility or imagination). Also, it’s lower frequency, so annoying kiddies don’t get that perverse joy from all the knee-jerk reactions to their stupidity that they would get in a chat room. In short, comments are less fun to screw with, so they end up being more valuable and less mindless.
When comments become higher frequency and approach the interaction of a chat room, average intelligence tends to drop (viz: Digg comments).
2
Well, I’ll admit that I’m not all that up on how this is supposed to work, but it sounds remarkably similar to something that I had been thinking would be a neat idea over the summer. Sure, some overpopulated sites will turn into mindless flame wars, but it could also be a great venue for meeting people with similar interests, particularly if it’s implemented on smaller, more out-of-the-way sites (like the 3bubbles people actually suggest on their blog). The likelihood of finding your run-of-the-mill internet jackass on a less-known site is much smaller, and if you’re both at the same place, you almost definitely have at least some similar interests, be it artificial intelligence, stalking Brian Shih, or even just that you both want to buy a camera.
As to the high-frequency breeding lower intelligence, I would say that the problem isn’t the frequency of comments, it’s too many people commenting. What inevitably (in my experience) bogs down comment boards is when twenty-five people feel obligated to post the same response to something. This generates most of the unnecessary clutter, and also encourages the retard who started the debate to keep it going. With smaller numbers of people, it’s much easier to ignore the retards, filter them out, and ignore them until they get bored and move on.
So if you think about this as something for a site like here (I’m not insulting your traffic too much, am I?) and not a site like Techcrunch, it makes a lot more sense. Sure, you might not run into people all that often, but when you do, the likelihood that they’ll be worth talking to is relatively high, and to be honest, it can be hard to find people on the web who meet that criteria.
3
(aβ Member)
Yeah, but I don’t want to sit around in an empty chat room waiting for the cool person to show up. Call me lazy I guess…
4
Yeah, but if you’ve got a real-time display of who’s around you can just go about your usual business, and you might just happen to run into someone interesting while you do it.
5
(Trackback)
alwaysBETA » Internet friendship
[…] The vast majority of my online communication is with people I know in real life, and when I mentioned this fact to Brian, he realized it too. We’ve had a few notable exceptions, like my AIM Conversation From Hell (annotated!) and Brian’s infamous Robot Chat. By and large however, we usually know the person we’re talking to in some sort of context. I think this is why the experience of going into a chat room when we checked out 3bubbles felt so weird. Not having real world context to put the people I was chatting with into definitely threw me for a loop. […]