[alanchrishughes]

@Driftless1 “Are we trying to artificially create a difference where there is none? Or is the difference there – Buddypress is just not making it clear enough?”

I think they are all the same, they are all just conversations, with different ways of going about having it. Buddypress seems confusing or lost in between because it is rightfully tyring to integrate these barely different means of having conversations into one more complete and convenient system.

The site I am working on has had a main news/blog section for about 3 years now. So I am looking at 3 main types of conversations

1. Comments on news articles and the comments on their comments which can become a lot like a forum topic.

2. An actual forum topic started by the user them self about something they feel is important enough for the world to hear.

3. Short and pointless twitter/facebook type comments that they don’t necessarily care to share with the world, whether it is because it is private or they know it just isn’t important enough, just something for friends who might be interested in know “omg! i finally finished all my cleaning my gutters!”

I think it just comes down to the user. It is about a user and their conversations, where ever they are taking place, then being fed back to one convenient location for all their buddies to find. I think it would be really neat to create some kind of universal user profile similar to gravatar so what ever website you are on, you can comment there and it will feed back to your personal profile with a link to that website and that comment so your friends can see what you are talking about out there and maybe jump in the conversation also. This would obviously open a pandora’s box of options on how or where you want your conversations to appear, but I’m certain that is the direction for “web 2.0.” The same way we boycot proprietary code, browsers, file types, or software, I think we will boycot myspaces and facebooks for universal profiles.