Forumcon 2014 Musings, Part 2 - Episode 20
We’re back after a long hiatus. We missed you!
Scott and Randy contunue sharing thoughts and observations inspired by ForumCon 2014, held in June. This time focusing on the transformation of the industry driven by mobile (keyboardless) devices.
Episode Summary:
- Greetings from Susan Tenby from Caravan Studios.
- ForumCon Organizer Lucy Bartlett rocked it.
- Mentioned: Daniel Ha
- Mentioned: Courtney Couch
Transcript
Susan: Hi this is Susan Tenby of Caravan Studios and the online community meet up (#octribe) and you are listening to the Social Media Clarity Podcast.
Scott: There are plenty of people and plenty of places and I think that there are plenty of times when we both simply converse and don’t try to craft every single thing. Even when there’s a little bit of maybe fact or speculation going on in our conversations. I think we still have that.
Randy: Of course, certainly, we do face-to-face because we don’t have time to do a lookup every time we’re talking.
Scott: But how many times have you been talking to somebody and suddenly said, “Wait a minute, we can get the answer to this.”?
Randy: Today?
Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media in platform and product design.
Welcome to Episode 20. I’m Randy Farmer. In this episode, Scott Moore and I continue our discussion of ForumCon 2014.
I missed a portion of the center of the conference and was unable to attend the presentations of the technological partners. Did you witness this and do you have your thoughts?
Scott: Oh no I didn’t. I’m sorry. I was just like I really don’t want to hear 5-minute pitches. It was entertaining the year before when the Forum vendors were up on stage watching them getting hammered by Forum owners especially on the mobile question. That was one thing that was interesting; was that this year, they had an entire session on mobile and there was some progress from the Forum vendors on mobile.
But the year before, there was nothing but anger about the fact that Forum vendors were not providing anything on mobile. They weren’t even providing adaptive interfaces on mobile.
Anyway, it was really interesting and it’s still a problem that needs to be solved is mobile communities were being viewed as read-only or consumable. It’s like you consume what’s in the community but you don’t participate.
And I think there’s still a lot of room to figure out how can we help people participate in a mobile fashion, particularly in a text-based long form or in a rich information way in mobile communities. And not a lot of people have really cracked that nut.
Randy: We definitely are at a transitional period where the mobile format still hasn’t actually stabilized other than - browsers will probably always work on mobile phones. There’s still a kind of question, is it more like Instagram? Is it more like chat? Is it more like typing paragraphs at each other?
The consensus seemed to be it’s probably not the last except if voice-to-text might work. Daniel Ha made the observation that if they have both a mobile interface for long form comments and there’s also a keyboard nearby, he, like me, will set down his mobile device and walk over to his keyboard to compose a fairly rich or long text response.
Scott: What I’d like to contrast that with is Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter is not long form but it is definitely conversational. And I think there’s a lot who participate on Twitter via mobile almost exclusively.
And I know I tend to use Facebook both mobile and keyboard. And I actually haven’t found a difference. It depends on where I happen to be sitting. If I don’t feel like getting up, and I’m on mobile, or I’m on a pad, and I’m in Facebook, I can go ahead and write long form.
Randy: Do you do defenses and positions? Like you might do on a message board or forum?
Scott: What do you mean defenses and positions? So like lay out full arguments?
Randy: Yes, what I find is it’s been a lot of time, even in my hobby forums, describing something in some great detail or responding to someone who I think is misunderstanding something, it doesn’t have to a major issue today and maybe what sharp knife do you use for cutting paper.
Those conversations don’t take place in the similar forum structures on Facebook. No one talks about that in the Facebook group page but they’re discussing them on forums. There seems to be some difference. In my experiences, the nature of the conversation is kind of tied up in its form of expression. It’s Mcluhanesque.
Scott: Yeah. It would be fascinating to get data on this. It would be really fascinating to see what portion of Facebook and Twitter posts are put up “mobile” and maybe some information about what kind of information gets passed and forth.
I’ll tell you, with Facebook the only time that I will ditch mobile and switch over to a computer is because I want to post a link because I’m saying something and I want to post a link and that is because Facebook, if you try to page off of Facebook, it kills the app and you lose your post, most often. And that’s a technical problem. If they fixed that problem, I would do it.
If I don’t have to back my argument up with a link to somewhere else, then very often, yeah it’s almost equal.
Randy: Earlier in this conversation, I referred to a slide by Courtney Couch, which contained an image called Turd Polish. He was making a comment about what happens if you only use user interface design aesthetics when you consider building a social product. It’s like polishing a turd made from his image on the internet. He put it on the screen. I went, “That’s an awesome image to capture that idea.” I want to get it.
And until that moment, I was using mobile for Twitter and then I had to put it down because I had to (a.) Search. (b.) Find the link. Make sure it was appropriately hosted or pinned in somewhere, then grab that URL and embed it in Twitter.
Now, it’s kind of interesting and ironic if you were right and mobile can solve problems that basically are being solved by reasonable or at least a tolerable copy and paste mechanism on PC’s or keyboard-driven computers. You might be right because when I was thinking about your argument, when I think about the rich things I’m posting on my hobby boards or these things I’m really interested in, I’m embedding links and images and structuring the layout of it so it looks nice when it gets presented and all those things.
Honestly, Facebook’s host composer is actually really good at many of those cases. Specifically, if you get a link to it, it goes and it does all these compositions stuff, pulling in the images and the header, if it’s well-formatted post. So it’s interesting.
After I create a rich post, whether be on a blog or a message board somewhere, embedding it in Facebook works the way I wished creating the first post worked. That’s one of the interesting Schelling points. You take that kind of structure and find a way to do reasonable cross-application references between applications in mobile and we might see a significant decrease in participation in things like hobbyist and specialist forums because you don’t need the special tools anymore.
Scott: Yeah, I think that’s part of it. I think it’s not just cut and paste. It’s being able to go out and research your answer. When I’m really crafting something, and I want to post to someone and I’m trying to pull things up, I will give you a Facebook example where I was giving some recommendations to somebody who was visiting New York and I was telling about my neighborhood and the cool things I thought were in my neighborhood.
And I wanted to verify the name of one the places and as soon as I left Facebook, it wasn’t about, I didn’t cut and paste anything and I just wanted to go research my answer and make sure my answer was going to be correct for this particular person. And I leave Facebook and I go research the answer and I come back with the answer and Facebook has ditched my post. So since I had the answer, I had to rewrite the answer.
But it was still on mobile the whole time. I didn’t throw the mobile down and go over and find the post on Facebook again. I stayed on mobile.
Randy: I have a strange thought about this. Maybe I’ll wrap my conversation about ForumCon with this.
In real life, before we had Google, before we could cut and paste and confirm things were true, when we wanted to say something and we weren’t sure it was 100% right, we just said it anyway.
I’m fascinated where this has led for me. When I’m doing this complicated post constructions I’m creating, I’m trying to be right. I’m trying to make it the best post about that topic that I can possibly make it. I’m spending tens of minutes often to construct these things. That has nothing to do with conversation. That’s preparing a blog post. That’s preparing a paper.
Somehow because we’ve made it so easy to access information, supposedly correct information, it’s all in our fingertips. I suffer from the problem of wanting to always seem like I’m correct all the time instead of just getting through the conversation and moving on the next one. And that’s probably a big difference between conversational forums which I will loosely throw Twitter and Facebook into versus what we often talk about when we talk about forums where long form communication.
After all, blogs are derived from forum technology. There were forums and blogs came when we wanted to deal with how do we control all these problems with content. And the answer is well we’ll give you a forum and call it a weblog. You create the threads and you moderate all the replies. It’s fascinating how this path force, when you take away the ability to get it all right and construct big long things because you just have to get this done in less than a minute, how it crafts the nature of the conversation.
Scott: Yeah, I’ve abandoned more tweets that I can count because by the time I crafted it so that it was right or I felt that it was a valuable addition to the conversation, the conversation had moved on.
Randy: Exactly. We used to risk error.
Scott: Yeah, well what’s funny is I grew up in a household where dad especially would punctuate his discussions with an open encyclopedia so I kind of grew up that way.
Randy: So the internet’s your favorite kind of place.
Scott: It is. And when you’re into history especially when you have a lot of amateur historians and I’m not a professional but we’re all amateurs. Yeah, If we can nail things down rather than speculate, we think that’s better for us.
But I would say that there are plenty of people and plenty of places, and I think that there are plenty of times when we both simply converse and don’t try to craft every single thing. Even when there’s a little bit of maybe fact or speculation going on in our conversations. I think we still have that.
Randy: Of course, certainly. We do face-to-face because we don’t have time to do a lookup every time we’re talking.
Scott: Oh, but how many times have you been talking to somebody and suddenly said, “Wait a minute, we can get the answer to this.”
Randy: Today?
Scott: So, I think that the access to information,,., During this podcast?
Randy: Probably about a half dozen times.
Scott: I think you’re right. The nature of the access to information could be shifting how some of our conversations are going. I think that the technology, whether it’s forums or whether it’s social media, or anything, still needs to catch up to how we rapidly shift and have conversations. I still think there’s a lot of room to help people have civil discussions, good quality discussions, rather than just hear, make a comment, and move on.
Randy: That sounds like an awesome wrap to this episode. So let’s tell the listeners, goodbye!
Scott: Yes. Thank you Lucy Bartlett and VigLink for ForumCon who helped stimulate a lot of thought with a whole lot of people and we really appreciate it.
Randy: And thanks to all the speakers and participants and the people who tweeted.
Scott: Awesome.
Randy: Until next time. Catch you later.
Scott: Bye.
Randy:For links, transcripts, and more episodes, go to socialmediaclarity.net. Thanks for listening.