Conversations Are Becoming Fragmented: The Case for a Killer Conversation Tracker Application

Quick Summary: As conversations become fragmented across social networks, there will be a huge business potential for a killer conversation tracker application that allows you to track and publish all the conversations around your content in one place, on your blog.

Over the last few months, I have noticed a new pattern emerge in how I engage in conversations:-

Step 1: I often use Twitter to pre-test a post idea. I typically tweet the topic I’m planning to write a post on and often get twenty plus reactions and suggested links. This enables me to include multiple perspectives in the post.

Step 2: Whenever I’m writing an involved post, I try to capture the essence of the topic in a graph and post it on Flickr. Typically, five to ten people comment on the graphs on Flickr and Twitter, which further helps me pre-test my post idea.

Step 3: Finally, using the tweets and the graph as a starting point, I write a post on my blog. Most of my posts get five to ten comments on the blog itself.

Step 4: I find that most of the conversation around my posts have moved to Twitter, with some posts resulting in twenty plus responses. Sometimes, people comment on the post, then tweet about it. Sometimes, people don’t comment on the post and directly shift the conversation to Twitter.

Step 5: I also import some of my posts as notes in Facebook. Apart from the comments on my blog, some of my posts get five to ten comments on Facebook.fa

Step 6: Some of these conversations then move to e-mail and IM. Typically, these are conversations about collaborative projects based on the post.

Step 7: Finally, some of these online conversations move offline, onto telephone calls, events and one-to-one meetings.

This is great because having these multiple conversations allows my idea-memes to spread faster and wider than it would have been possible only with the blog post (tweet).

However, the flip side is that conversations are increasingly becoming fragmented (tweet). Very often, if one of my blog posts gets fifty plus reactions, only ten odd of them are on my blog (tweet). This means that in spite of my repeating myself across social networks, people who are participating in the conversation get to see only part of the entire picture. I sometimes try to capture these conversations in a follow-up post, but that isn’t always possible.

While life-streaming services like Spokeo, Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed claim to solve such fragmentation, they, in fact, add to the fragmentation by becoming another place where conversations happen.

In spite of my very active presence on multiple social networks, I still look at my blog as my online home. What I really want back is the ability to host these conversations on my blog. I’m sure there are others who want the same and I think that there’s a huge business potential for a killer application that allows you to track and publish all the conversations around your content in one place, on your blog (tweet).

This is what the killer conversation tracker application will need to do —

Step 1: Aggregate and track my web presence — including blog(s), microblog(s), photo site(s), video site(s), music site(s), book site(s), movie site(s), event site(s), travel site(s), shopping site(s), social sharing site(s), social bookmarking site(s), social voting site(s), personal social network(s), professional social network(s) and e-mail(s) — in one place. This is what most life-streaming services do as of now. Please note that the focus is on tracking my web presence, not my contacts’.

Step 2: Aggregate and track conversations around the content created by me — comments/ linkbacks/ bookmarks/ votes/ reviews/ mentions related to my posts/ photos/ videos — in one place. Please note that the focus is on my content, not on my relationships.

Step 3: Enable me to automatically (or manually) tag or attach these conversations to my blog posts, then publish them on my blog, as part of the post. I’m visualizing a tabbed system that displays: 7 comments, 13 votes on Digg, 12 saves on del.icio.us, 7 reviews on StumbleUpon, 6 trackbacks, 5 comments on Flickr, 4 comments on Facebook, 37 tweets on Twitter, total 91 conversations. This will probably be best implemented by a WordPress plugin.

Basically, if the analogy helps, the conversation tracker application I’m talking about will be the opposite of CoComment: instead of tracking all your comments on content created by others in one place, you’ll track and publish all the conversations around your content in one place, on your blog.

What do you think? As conversations become more fragmented across social networks, what would you (not) give to get this killer conversation tracker application?