How we can merge social networks, blogs & messaging apps into one conversational interface

To begin let’s see the specificities of each of those 3 types of platform

1 —The post in a blog

Also known as the article and now the story, the post is the favourite form of content for journalists and writers. It is by essence a public information. Interactions with the post rely on comments that the reader can write below it. Medium innovates by allowing people to comment on a specific part of a post.

Posts and comments are 2 different ‘objects’

2—The status in a social network

This is the core feature of social networks. At first it was private (Facebook status) then Twitter has democratised the public status. Like blog posts, commenting a status is possible. The other difference between Facebook and Twitter, is that a comment on Facebook is a specific type of content while on Twitter, a comment below someone’s tweet is also a tweet by itself. This create an equal relationship between the tweets.

Status and comments in the case of Twitter are of the same type of object

3 — The message in a conversation

This is the most organic and natural way to convey an information and interact with it. On the contrary of the blog post model or the facebook status model, there is no hierarchy between participants of a conversation. All messages are being treated equally.

The beauty of a conversation is that information does not rely only on one person’s thought. But rather on how this thought evolves depending on the comment of the other participant. On the contrary of blog posts and Twitter status, by essence a conversation is private.

Messages are of the same type. Conversation are private (Whatsapp, Telegram, Messenger…)

No matter what platform you are using, in the end, you are looking for two things: to get informed and to give your opinion.

The problem is we actually use 3 different types of platform to accomplish each use cases above.

The two first model tends to be public. The conversation model is still mostly used privately

For example, Facebook propose Facebook Note to write an article, the status bar to write a status and Messenger to chat privately. Those three types of content are not designed to interact directly.

What if we can use only one functionality to write a status that can be the begining of an article, and a chat with someone? This is what I try to do with Forum.

Introducing Forum

On Forum you have only one single type of content: the card. Let’s see how Forum handles those 3 use cases above with cards.

1 — Forum as a social network

In this use case, people write a thought (400 characters max) and post it in a card. Other people can comment it. The particularity is that each comment is a card as well. Which means you can comment the comment. And keep commenting the comments indefinitely.

2 — Forum as a blogging platform

You can also reply to one of your post, and keep replying to yourself as long as you want. By doing so you create a story. Other users can keep replying to you on any specific part of your story.

By replying to yourself, you can display your posts as a story

3 — Forum as a messaging app

Each card and comment is also the beginning of a conversation. If someone replies to you, and you reply to him, this will automatically open a chat room for both of you. The particularity is that this chat is public and everybody can read it and participate to it at anytime.

You can easily display the cards in a chat layout

In the Forum, each single thought is a status that can be the beginning of a story and a conversation.

Forum is in public bêta, you can try it now on Android here

If you want to see a demo, check this presentation

If you want to know more about the vision of Forum, please read this article

Ps: This article was first published on Forum :-)