Conversations Grow By Interest, Not By Invite

The best conversations I’ve been a part of recently have grown organically.

Here’s how it works. Someone like Matthew Shadbolt throws out a question, or a thought about a link. Someone like Gahlord Dewald throws out a response. Sometimes, it stops there. But when it doesn’t, that’s when the magic happens.

When a good thought combines with the right timing and broad interest, the conversation grows in ways that are unpredictable and often not in a defined timeframe. In fact, if the conversation were simply to begin with an invite to three or four people, the organic growth of that conversation would never happen. It’s hard to predict the viral nature of a conversation or what one response will trigger greater involvement by a community of listeners.

We’re looking for a better Twitter conversation platform. We tried Nurph this morning. (See below.) And while it is a nice little tool, it’s not the tool that will allow conversations to grow organically. That tool would allow easy following of the conversation, the ability to see threaded replies to specific tweets, and automatically post the entire conversation as individual tweets on Twitter. That tool needs to be built.