This is a follow-up to my post on whether a distributed Follow system could add value to blog subscription feeds by encouraging some of the transparency, closeness and viral capabilities of Twitter and other services that use Follow.
The supporting gestures found in Follow systems create additional forms of expression over and above creating original content. Features like ‘reblog’ (or ‘retweet’) and ‘like’ capture feelings towards pieces of content and publish them as standardized gestures. They seem to drive a lot of virality in services like Twitter and Tumblr because they help spread content through networks of followers like a crowd of people keeping balloons up in the air by tapping them lightly when they pass over head.
In the same way that subscribing has the same end result as following, some social gestures have always been technically available as blogging tools. For example, blockquotes could be viewed as a way to reblog specific paragraphs of another post. However, blockquotes are interpreted as a way to refer to another piece of content. They don’t necessarily transmit any implicit or explicit gesture by themselves. The whole point of a reblog is to share the reblogged portion of the post even if comments are added. They are two completely different gestures, or one is a social gesture and one isn’t.
I think it’s good example of why the words matter because they change what it means to do what is essentially the same thing from a technical perspective. It’s also one of the reasons why subscribing is not the same as following. Perhaps the way to distinguish blockquotes and reblogs is that blockquotes serve the user by helping them make their point, whereas reblogs are more generous and help users promote the original content creator and only by extension themselves.
So far, social gestures have lived inside specific social media services although they can become somewhat distributed through aggregators like FriendFeed. It really includes it’s own gestures but since content is aggregated from other sources, it allows users to apply gestures to content created elsewhere. In some cases, things added to FriendFeed are integrated back into the source system.
Other services like Disqus include ‘reblog’ and ‘like’ gestures for blog content and could provide a template for other services that would collectively result in a distributed social gesture system for the Web. However, similar to the Follow model, I wonder if there is something about the short-form content published via Twitter and Tumblr that makes it more suited to social gestures? After all, Twitter isn’t a micro-blogging platform as much as it is a place, in part because of the supporting social gestures.
As posts become shorter and more real-time, they mimic real-life conversations more closely with Twitter at one end of the scale and blogs at the other. In that sense, social gestures are more like responses to other people than references to content. I also think the ability to retweet or reblog a piece of content in its entirety could be a reason why it’s more more popular for short-form content. Or, perhaps we just put more of ourselves into blog content that we are more protective of it.
If our blogs are where we live and Twitter is a place where we meet to talk. The difference in reblogging in those contexts could be the different between taking something from someone’s home, and just repeating what they said in a bar. So, would social gestures work as well or be as popular for long-form content like blogs as they are for shorter, more conversational content? I’d love to know what you think.
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Posted on March 31, 2009
My name is Phillip Baker and this is my personal blog about finding value in a world of free information.