Re: Wire 1.2
@mentionsw I agree with your opinion that buddypress shouldn’t try to copy the Twitter model for user to user interaction. The Twitter design excels at some forms of user to user interaction but is incredibly awkward and difficult to use for doing something as simple as initiating and holding a conversation.
It’s no secret that the overwhelming majority of Twitter users stop tend to quickly stop participating in two-way conversations and instead become passive consumers of updates by a small group of very active twitter users. This is in a large part due to the fact that the twitter system is very unfriendly towards bidirectional user interaction. Even with a Twitter client it can be really easy to loose track of a conversation because @mentions are linked to the user instead of a specific tweet. Facebook and similarly designed services are vastly superior in this regard.
I don’t think buddypress should be copying the Twitter system while at the same time excluding the systems such as Facebook and Myspace which the large majority of people are accustomed with. Instead, the twitter system should be part of a system that gives buddypress users the option of different types of user to user interaction instead of forcing them to use one particular style.
On a side note, I don’t think this has anything to do with a generation gap between Twitter users and Facebook users. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube all have different kinds of qualities that are suited to satisfy specific social needs of their respective users. For some needs people are more likely to use one network and for other needs people are more likely to use another network. Just because the Twitter system is relatively new and currently being hyped doesn’t make it superior to other systems.
