TalkDigger is quietly evolving toward something new. I have been thinking for some time now about how Talk Digger might evolve and how the “conversations evolving on the Internet” paradigm could be extended. I have had many ideas in the past months, some better and bigger than others.

Then I told myself: Fred, you have to start somewhere.

This is obvious; but there’s a significant process behind that obvious affirmation.

Here’s what I have done since I came back from India: I started somewhere. I started to develop a new feature (in fact it is a whole new infrastructure), layered above which I will be able to build other things. The process is quite simple; think small first, and extend features and functionality later.

Easy to say, and it’s what I’m doing … but the result is not that simple.

So now, which direction is Talk Digger taking?

the vision is always the same: helping people find, follow and enter discussions which are evolving on the Internet. With the current capabilities of Talk Digger, a user can find discussions somewhat easily. The results are sometimes good, and at other times not so good. The presentation is normal and somewhat intuitive, as it mimics the user interface of traditional search engines.

Talk Digger also generate RSS feeds with search results. This feature is really interesting because you will receive new results [new discussion’s items] directly in your web feed reader. However, the interaction between web-feed-readers / Talk Digger / search-engines is not that good. Some results are marked as new day after day, etc. It is a good start but it is not enough for me, and certainly not for Talk Digger users.

As you know, Talk Digger is not that bad, but there’s definitely room (and the need) to upgrade it. One of the core problems is that all the requests are processed in real time. It is good for me, because I can easily host Talk Digger on low cost web servers. However, this advantage is not that good for the users. It was a first step; now I have to go forward with the next steps.

So, what are those next steps? Archiving data, and then with that data I will be able to develop ideas that are impossible without the stored archived data.

This is the first next step: developing a Talk Digger Crawler, gathering data, archiving and updating it.

After that I intend to create a community infrastructure, in order to:

• Help people to define themselves by their works, their interests, and their relations with other people.
• Help people to find someone that they could connect with.
• Help people to get connected and communicate with other community members.

I also to create an upgraded infrastructure to track and define conversations, so as to:

• Help people to easily track conversations.
• Help people to find interesting conversations.

Finally, I plan to create an infrastructure that lets people easily enter into a discussion they have found using Talk Digger.

That is it.

With these new features, Talk Digger will go a step further into the direction of its driving vision: helping people to find, follow and enter into conversations which are evolving on / in the Internet.

Some people may think that I am trying to shovel clouds, but I am not. The development of this “new system” is on the way. In about 2 months I should start to distribute private access to some people to test the new system. That way in about 3 months or so, if everything goes fine, I should publicly release this new version.

Naturally I will keep you in touch with the developments! If anything crosses your mind while reading this post, please leave a comment below… who knows, it certainly might be helpful to me!

Technorati: Talkdigger | conversation | discussion | community | interaction | development | crawler | infrastructure |