Why comments will die and what will replace them

In December I predicted that 2007 is the year comments will die but it's taken me a while to explain why. Which is just as well really considering Stowe Boyd has now done the job for me.

In parts 1 and 2, I summarised the changing nature of the web and the ways in which it is being turned inside out. To recap -

1. Why browse the web when the web can browse you? Aggregation is the new browsing (see "Google ReWriter is on the way"). We aggregate so we can annotate (see point 3).
2. The web revolves around me (and you) so my satellite apps should absorb the relevant rays from my stream of digital outputs, the ticker tape of my life. I life cache and radiate a continuous feed of annotations - my uniFeed.
3. The Machines is Us/ing me because I'm an Application. My interface to the web is described by the 'Biological Brit', the inverse of the Mechanical Turk. Everything is annotation - we're making sense of the world for our offspring, the machines.

Points 1 and 2 above highlight the fact that the web is turning inside out. We've already started bringing the web to us on the consumption side, through widgets, start pages and feed readers. So also will the web come to us on the publication side by scanning the microformatted uniFeed we radiate. Just as we are now aggregating the web, the web will aggregate us.

Instead of blogging here, twittering there and posting photos everywhere we'll throw our life cache into our uniFeed and have our satellite apps render the relevant items. Our blog will render our essays, our presence apps will render our status reports, our photo apps will render our snaps, and so on.

As it turns out Stowe Boyd and Emily Chang have been thinking along similar lines. Stowe says -

"We will increasingly move toward a flow model: where the various bits that we craft and throw into the ether -- blog posts, calendar entries, photos, presence updates, whatever -- will be picked up by other apps, either to display them to us, or to make sense of them. We want to consolidate all into one flow -- a single time-stamped thread -- that all apps can dip into."

Exactly! That's what I've been referring to as a uniFeed (unified Feed). But here's the clincher, Stowe hits the ball out of the park when forecasting how this different view of the web will affect the nature of commenting -

"This world of traffic will change things like blogging: instead of commenting at someone's post -- a static, page-centric system -- I might simply create a commentary with a link to the original (which I may have discovered in my inbound traffic, not necessarily by browsing his/her blog), and I drop a comment into my traffic, where it flows out to all those who want to see my natterings."

While he hints that microformats are the answer he doesn't point to the Comment Problem on Microformats.org. My worry about the current description is that it's focused on comment tracking. But tracking isn't the primary issue, rather how we can use microformats to re-architect and replace Trackback (which had the right idea but wrong implementation).

And how will we publish these microformatted comments? With our Google ReWriters (or other 2nd generation aggregator/annotators). We can already use Google Reader to annotate (tag) posts, just press 'T'. A new version will allow us to comment, just press 'C'. These comments will be microformatted and tossed back into our uniFeeds, there to be scanned and recombined back into the discussion flow by any microformat aware aggregator.

For now at least, though the ultimate life caching aggregator/annotator will be a fusion of silicon and software built into every mobile phone. But that's for another post....

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