Thomas Robertson

Well, I've had this account for a while, and while I've been working on the project itself, I never got around to writing it up here. So, let's see if I can do this quickly.

Some context: I'm a graduate student at NYU focusing on social networks from both a sociology and a code-writing perspective. I'm fascinated by the ways we design our technological platform affect the way we act socially when dealing with mediated environments. I tend to favor technologically-simple (at least relatively speaking) interventions that have significant impact on the way we act.

I've been watching DW's development since the early days, and it's been a really fascinating project to me. One of the things I've been interested in is how it manages to convince people to move from LJ. This is, it turns out, a pretty tough proposition because moving platforms tends to cut you off in some ways from the social network (in the social, not technological, sense) you've built up. Some of your friends won't move, if only because some of their friends won't move.

Now, DW has done a tremendous amount with things like prominent OpenID support, and simple cross-posting in an attempt to reduce the friction involved in operating across the DW-LJ barrier, and that's a big deal and it's been quite well-executed. But going through my own LJ and seeing cross-posted stuff from DW, I found myself hesitant to click off to another site. Not because I don't like DW, but because... I don't know. There's a sort of comfort of being where you already are. So it was rare for me to read comments on a thread with a note to go to DW for discussion, and I'm not sure I ever actually contributed to those few discussions I read. Again, not for any technological reason: OpenID works just fine, after all, but for some sort of weird social reason.

This phenomenon isn't precisely new. YouTube was one of the first sites I know of to really take advantage of it. Embeddable video means you don't have to go anywhere to see what you want to see, and depending on who's estimates you're going with and what the video is, making a video embeddable rather than linking directly to YouTube and requiring users to watch it there can increase viewership by a factor of 10.

So, all of this is a long-winded way of saying: wow, I think DW is super cool, but there are some things I wish it magically did. And the biggest of those things is that I wish threads could cross-post between DW and LJ in the same way that posts can.

Which is when I realized that, from a purely technological standpoint, this isn't actually that hard a thing to do.

And that's what Banyan Speak is about: providing a simple method for discussions to be relatively portable. For you to be able to comment on a discussion right where you already are. If you cross-post something to multiple services, you want people to be able to participate in the discussion from all of those services, not require them to all come to one place.

Or, at least, I don't. I fully recognize that this isn't some sort of solution to all discussions ever on the internet, but it seems that it is a solution to some discussions in some places.

I've actually done quite a bit of code work already at this point, but I'm beginning to realize just how much more needs to be done. I'll hopefully be delving into more detailed technical stuff in some posts soon.