This is a description of an architecture for Public Internet Communications that I believe we are headed towards.
I described it to Mattis, and he called it "one big soup," which I think is a good name for it.
Why do I think we're going this way?
Because:
There is a trend from centralized coordination to decentralized coordination.
People leave KuroShin diaries to go start their own blogs, and their own RSS feeds. People are groping for technologies to make threaded conversations across the internet easy. The idea of "portable threaded conversations" is floating around.
These technologies all start as experiments on centralized servers, but they always end up floating away. That way, people can have independence, and they can do things their own way, and they can experiment with new technologies, and they can develop new things, without being tied to a particular server and a particular guy and a particular community.
Because:
We are already going that way.
Consider that we already feel the pressure to implement BuiltinThreading in wiki. I think we all know it's more or less a good idea; We just are weary of FeatureKarma. And right we should be. What do we do as developers when we feel we are putting in too much technology in one place? Well, we decouple things. Which is exactly what I'm talking about: Massive decoupling.
Having thought of the model in this way, it became clear to me: Wiki "should" also support blogs. Not just pages that we keep our blogs on, but- bona fida blogs. That you can just type away into. That have summaries, which are then aggregated into a central "Here's the CommunityWiki blog aggregation," collecting all our community's CommunityWiki blogs together on.
"But we can already do this on CommunityWiki," I hear you cry. Yes, we can. But, no, it's not good enough, dammit. This is the same as BuiltinThreading. We don't want to have to edit a whole page, just to add an entry. We don't want cheesy techniques and hacks. We don't want to type [[ new ]]. We want to just hit "Add Blog Entry," type in a summary in the summary box, type in a full entry in the full entry box, and have that go to a special "this is blogs" section, and have that be it. I know that we can simulate all this by using pure wiki pages, but just because we can, doesn't mean that that's the best, and that that's what we want to do.
We can simulate full-featured K5 or Slashdot style threading. But that's not what we really want. (Then again, we don't want to be constrained by K5's and Slashdot's threading either- we'd like to be able to erase threads, too. In most cases.)
So my points are:
The technology is already moving towards decentralization of architecture. That's the example of people ditching K5 diaries and watch lists when they realize how to make blogs, RSS feeds, and use aggregators.
We are already working on putting more and more under the umbrella of "wiki."
The logical conclusion of these two forces is that: We'll put more into wiki. And then it will all explode outwards. The architecture I have described as "One Big Soup" is an exploded architecture.
Why This is Cool
Once things have exploded out, they become much more... Open. Spacious. And even "Soupy."
When you're locked into LiveJournal, you're locked into LiveJournal. You can only play link games with your LiveJournal friends.
When you're locked into KuroShin, you're locked into KuroShin. You can't publicize your non-existant RSS feed for your K5 diary. You can't aggregate non-K5 people into your K5 watch list. You're stuck with K5 people.
But once things explode out, there's a faaaar vaster community, with much more going on in it, and much more choice, and much more diversity, and much more experimentation, than the GatedCommunity could ever provide.