Interesting discussion going on on FriendFeed, started by an email Bob Bly sent to Scoble.
Now, because I spend a ridiculous amount of time browsing almost every section of the bookstore, I know exactly who Bob Bly is. He’s the author of a list of books about copy writing as long as your arm, and several other topics as well (though mostly related to that sort of thing).
In a nutshell, Bob asked Robert (pretty respectfully, I thought) why the heck he gets so excited about everything he writes about (Twitter, FriendFeed, so on). Robert’s answer… was maybe not quite as civil as one might expect. This was pointed out in the discussion on FriendFeed, and Robert asked (reasonably enough) — Well, how would you answer the question?
Which started me thinking. I think Bob’s question is a reasonable one, but at the same time, I think I understand Scoble’s frustration with the question. So how would I answer it?
(Keep in mind — I’m not going to claim anything that follows is necessarily original to me. It’s just my first thoughts on the topic, much of which is probably culled from a lot of what I’ve read over the last couple years on the value of these things, and my own experience using them.)
It’s a conversation.
There’s a huge, enormous conversation taking place on the web, and most of these sites are either a place where the conversation itself is played out (i.e., Twitter) or places where you can keep track of the participants of the conversation at large (i.e. Facebook).
Suppose I see a large, animated, round-table discussion1 going on in a room, and I say, “Why would I want to get involved with that table full of people having a discussion? Why is that so exciting? I’m pretty busy, and I don’t have a lot of time, so, I’m not going anywhere near it.” All I really just said was, that conversation is not important to me.
1 Okay, twitter, et al., are far more like a stadium full of countless small conversations, with some kind of magic added that lets you join multiple conversations at once… but I wanted a simpler example.
Which is fine, actually — not every conversation is important to every person. There are conversations in which I don’t take part, because I really don’t have anything to add. And then there are those that I do try to take part in, either because I do have something to say, or I’m curious to learn more, or else I just like the people in the conversation and would like to interact with them.
It’s pretty easy to look at Twitter and miss the conversation; people (cough-journalists-cough) love to say that it’s just a lot of internet denizens announcing what they had for breakfast or that they lost their car keys. Anyone who’s immersed themselves in Twitter knows that’s not the point, but for someone who hasn’t seen the conversation yet, that’s probably what it looks like.
So I think the short answer to the question, Why get excited about these Web applications?, is just: there’s a conversation going on. If the conversation and the people in it are interesting to you, then these tools will be exciting. If not, then they won’t be.
In fact, there won’t be very much for you to do with them.
