low inertia

Backtype

Here’s a strawman for you: a significant amount of the thought and discussion that occurs online is comments spread across various sites. Communities no longer (if they ever did) center around one hub for interaction. Bubblegen people have set up enough profiles across the web at Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, Technorati, etc. that curious interlopers can get a good picture of anyone’s online personality by culling these sources together. This dispersion of info across data sources is mirrored at the larger community level, where community identity defining discussions occur daily at various sites.

Backtype is a recent startup that aggregates an individual’s comments on various discussions into one location. I like how this consolidates a given player’s activity into one perusable page, though taken outside of the context of the full comment thread, comments can appear particularly inane. I suspect that if Backtype gets some traction, people may start writing comments that adhere to whatever style rules are currently de facto for blog posts.

I’ve only played around with the site a little bit, but I like the effort to bring my various discussions under one umbrella.

Hey, thanks for the mention. We’re exploring ways to address the problem with comments without context. For now you’ll notice that we link users directly back to the original post and conversation so that if they find a comment interesting it isn’t too difficult to find the full context.

I think you guys have hit on an important aggregation that I think has been largely ignored up until now, so I wanted to highlight that, rather than dwell on any implementation details. I’m sure you’ll run into some interesting tech challenges that will butt up against the natural vagaries of any discussion, so that’s something to look forward too.

I’ll definitely be keeping tabs to see where it all goes.