I’m starting up a group on a new site called Convore, to which you are all invited. My nephew is one of the three co-founders of this new startup that is part of the Y Combinator incubator process. I’ve been using it in beta since Thanksgiving as a family group site, and it’s recently been featured at SXSW and other conferences. (If you want to see more about it, here’s an interview with one of his partners.
It’s realtime chat and it really is fast and easy to use, and history is saved. It should be easy to start a new “topic” for every game. For when we want to do in-game commentary, it may be a better platform than a game thread on FK. For experimentation purposes, I’ve set it up as a private group (Free Konvore) and will be sending out invites. I have a few of your emails, and I will troll for more through the comments section but if you’re interested and don’t get an email from me soon send me one (coreylim75 at yahoo dot com) to make sure I have your address.
I just sent the invites, so if you didn’t get one sorry for missing you.
I’m posting the link here too.
Link
The realtime feature is nice, but the truth is I don’t need it that much. To the extent I participate in game threads I come over to the desktop and make a comment between innings; I’m not somebody who wants to watch the game with a computer on my lap. And when you’re used to the threading the lack of it is a bit frustrating.
I’m not sure FK game threads are ever going to attract that many comments anyway; that’s more of a ** thing. For me the Unread Comments with 30 seconds refresh over here is plenty good enough. If Konvore is the choice, that’s fine, but I’d be an irregular participant there.
I’m fine with whatever y’all decide. I do enjoy the real time threads. I think it’s a lot of fun, but I also understand it might not be what FK is all about. I’ll love FK, regardless.
I think that with the number of active participants necessary for real-time to be worthwhile (>>FK) you need proper threading.
Agreed – with the number of FKommenters we have regular refreshing is perfectly adequate even for real-time participation for me.
edit: And I miss the edit functionality.
It may be easier from mobile devices though.
I’ll cast another vote for FK threads – no offense to Convore.
/me piles on
Also piling on, but the non-instantness of FK is one of the reasons I don’t participate more. I’m somewhere in the middle; I like the instantness when I have the computer in front of me, but I like to be able to walk away and come back and figure out what’s going on, which is where threading is really helpful.
Instant live threading is one thing SBN does extremely well.
Yeah. There were a LOT more comments last night because it was instant
I don’t think there were more comments because it was instant as much as because it was a new toy we were trying out – a significant fraction of them were before the game even started.
Understood. I’ve never been a big game thread guy either, but occasionally do enjoy it. I’m excited for my nephew about his new project, but the lack of nested threads seems like a real limitation. That said, it did seem like we got good participation tonight, but that’s likely due to new tech + bay bridge game combined. The group is there, anyone should be able to start a new “topic” for a game, so I figure its a good experiment. If nothing else I can give him some feedback based on our usage.
It was a good experiment; thanks for setting it up. Convore may have found a niche for tech conversations, basically as an “instant forum” — tech forums aren’t threaded, but each conversation tends to be focused on a single topic so the threading’s not really needed. Best of luck to your nephew!
I think I see what they’re trying to do, but there are other companies out there with richer, more useful, more comprehensive targeted-social-networking services.
Sure there are, but that’s like predicting failure for Twitter based on the fact that email exists.
Thanks for the feedback. I’m not sure they’re aiming for “tech niche”, but based on our experience and from seeing what it’s currently being used for that seems to be the case, at least in this initial stage. I’m curious to see how it evolves over time.
Basically agree with what everyone else said: it’s a neat little site for what it does. In particular, like twitter it provides a simple interface for real-time conversations, and is particularly suited for mobile devices: new comments show up without the need for scroll up, reload, scroll back down, scan for what’s new.
And I think that mobile focus might be why they don’t have threading. Threading presents some problems when screen real estate is limited: you have to scroll back and forth in order to look for and read new comments that appear spatially before older ones, you waste further space with indenting or whatever else is used to indicate the threading, and you need some kind of visual indicator of which comments are new.
In any case, on balance I prefer the blog for the kind of low-volume, asynchronous conversations we tend to have here.
Two other suggestions for their mobile (ipod) version:
1. When you close and then reopen it, you have to click through twice (once to the group, once to the topic) to get back to where you were. Better to just put the user back where he left off, I think. (And that might also apply to the web version).
2. When the device goes to sleep or loses its wifi connection, and then reestablishes it, the automatic loading of new comments doesn’t always work right. They should have better logic for detecting this and forcing a reload and/or a mechanism for the user to manually force a reload, as twitter and facebook apps do.
Is there sufficient interest for me to try to build a FK 3.0 that uses WP3 and has ajaxed comments.
I don’t know if I can do it, but it was exciting to see ~100 comments on that thread
… and that was the moment where nm decided we needed to start using anodyne headlines …
I’m sorry, but your use of complex words like “anodyne” reduces our ability to attract yahooligans. Stop.
ajaxed = scoured? anodyne = pain-relieving?? WTF-K?
I commented a lot on Konvore just because I wanted to put sslinger’s experiment through its paces, not because the format inspired me to make more comments. My own take was that the inauguration of the real-time feature on ** contributed greatly to the downfall of the game threads there. Prior to that the game threads were maybe 400 comments because the user had to manually refresh the screen, which gave one time to read and digest what other people were saying before posting a comment of their own. As soon as the real-time comments came into being the game threads exploded into 2000+ comments and it seemed like it was a race to post as many comments as one could rather than listening to what anyone else was saying. I know LB loves the chat-room aspects of **; I don’t. I like that FKers read what others are saying and take time to think before they write and hit the Submit Comment button.
This
you
we
FKing elitist – requiring people be able to read to contribute.
all
forswore
Agree.
suck.
Adderall
Aspartame
an
what
Christ,
Could have at least made me an asp hole or something cool.
So Willingham looked awful and Tejada looked worse.
Neither team’s first run should have scored.
didja have fun, tho?
Yeah, I did. It was nice that Matsui snuck in an AB and LaRoche stood at SS (though no chances).
Coco needs to not immediately break his hand this year. He’s on fire.
He’s gonna be good. Offense still looks kind of anemic, though…
Also, the problem with Disqus (other than the cost) is that it almost certainly won’t track unread comments.
oh yeah. Forgot that part of it…good call.
Thanks to all of you for participating and providing your thoughtful comments. I will pass them on to him. No doubt he’s getting a ton of feedback from all the tech forums on there, but it doesn’t hurt to hear from folks who are using it for other purposes.
I agree with the sentiment that instant comments aren’t necessary for our group, and the lack of threading is problematic. I’ll leave the group up for a while at least (haven’t even checked to see if I can delete it) and may start some occasional topics/game threads there. And now you’re all members, so you can try it for other groups to see if they’re more compatible. As I said initially, we’ve been using it internally as a family group site since it was in beta, and it’s been fun and easy for all to use.
Hey JL, my nephew made a post saying “I have no idea what this says, but it made my day.” Can you give me a basic interpretation?
Oops, accidentally replied below.
Here’s my translation of the full article text. I didn’t bother with the images, because they’re just examples. It’s basically a tutorial for using Convore, with a hearty recommendation to use it.
Awesome, thank you!