BuddyPress.org

@modemlooper It’s similar but it’s inconsistent and confusing for users. I have to agree with nickrita that this appears to be a case of ‘Verschlimmbesserung’. It makes it unnecessarily complex to do something as simple as to leave a comment on someone’s profile and continue a conversation from there.

If the user activity stream is really meant to be purely about activities of the user as Andy said, why are we able to leave replies that show up in the user activity stream? If this principle were to be applied consistently, the user should also not be able to post replies into a user activity stream (or at least they should not show up in the user activity stream but instead at the @mention subsection).

As a result of these inconsistencies we have we have this confusing hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. I really like the idea of @mentions as an added feature to the way users can interact, but it shouldn’t be the sole method of (semi-)public user to user interaction. One of the major weaknesses of Twitter (and one of the major reasons Twitter clients are so popular) is that it’s extremely difficult to initiate and keep track of (semi)-public conversations on their website. Just try using twitter.com to hold multiple conversations if you have a group of active friends on there, it’s extremely frustrating and labour intensive. Buddypress doesn’t have the luxury of anything that resembles twitter clients to cover up these kind of limitations that are inherent to the twitter system.

I feel that the current implementation of buddypress leaves these weaknesses of the design of the twitter system intact and even further exacerbates them by inconsistent application.

I therefore plead for a consistent design that allows users to post both messages and replies into a user activity stream regardless of whether it’s the site, group or user activity stream. This would take care of the issue of the missing wire while at the same time providing a consistent user interaction design for the activity streams across a buddypress site.

@motionsw What would you think of a system where a user would be able to leave a message directly on the page of the user at the activity stream, similar to the way Facebook does it (and consistent in design with how you can leave a message on the buddypress group & site activity streams with a textbox near the top)? Whether such a message would then turn up in the group & site activity stream would be handled by privacy settings.