Once again- ADN and conversations

appnetAs noted last time, ADN is by far my favorite social network. The combination of good people, excellent (and varied) access apps, a paid-access model, and total privacy are irresistible. It is almost a dream come true.

I am even getting used to having conversations there, although it is much more difficult in ADN than it is in Plurk, a forum, or even in ADN’s own Patter. That is simply because one’s stream is a very long list of individual, seemingly unrelated, posts. This leaves a very good chance that you will miss parts of a conversation in which you might be interested.

Conversely, in Patter as a conversational example, the entirety of a conversation is conserved. Anyone entering the conversation can review it quickly in it’s entirety, if necessary, or from their last point of entry. That really does make it much more convenient to carry on a meaningful conversation.

In addition, a truly conversational view of one’s ADN stream would be much shorter and considerably easier to keep track of. As an example, let’s say you follow and/or are followed by 100 people, and on average those people post 50 items a day. In stream view, one at a time, you would be sifting through 5000 posts a day.

Most of the people you are followed by and who follow you will wind up in a lot of the same conversations. It is likely, using experience gained in almost five years on Plurk (and a quarter-million personal posts) and in countless forums, this tends to consolidate many posts into “responses” to a few “original posts” which start topics. An average ratio of this phenomenon is 10-20 responses per original post.

Using an average of 15 responses per original topic post, we can immediately divide the number of topics we have to keep track of in a day by 15; that reduces our total need-to-scan items from 5000 to 333. And with a unified timeline turned on, you will even see post from people not directly in your stream, helping you to see people in action and make new friends. And all of this while not missing a thing from your own private stream.

There are a lot of benefits to viewing your ADN stream as a series of conversations. Give me a shout (@KDFrawg on ADN) if you think you might like to see a client that uses the ADN stream in this conversational manner.

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About kdfrawg

... is a writer of books, blogs, bios, and software. Thirty years in the software business burned me out on programming languages so I'm working on proficiency in English. I term myself monolingually challenged. The good news is that novels don't have to compile. :)

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