What can FidoNet teach us about today's fragmented conversation dilemma?

Remember the good old BBS days? When you could find good conversation on FidoNet?

We talk about the noise and the fragmenting of the conversation online, but if you ask me, what we had back in the day wasn't so bad.

FidoNet was much easier to the average person to follow than USENET, and SysOps could pick and choose which message board topics to offer to their subscriber base to better streamline the conversation. It was about connecting the users and the conversations. Someone in Dallas, Texas posts about the election of Bill Clinton, and I could add my thoughts on a separate bulletin board system in Michigan. Then someone in California would look at what we both had to say and share their opinion with the both of us.

In the days before the Internet was widely accepted, this was one hell of a way to connect to people around the globe that had access to the FidoNet. And it worked.

FriendFeed, Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Google Reader Notes, Blog Comments, etc... the conversation is fragmented terribly these days. Maybe it's time we take a page from some "old school" technology.

What if someone developed some type of standard "protocol" for the conversation to flow upon. Blog comments, Twitter posts, Pownce, FriendFeed, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc... if it all flowed on some type of standard protocol that synchronized within an agreed upon and coordinated network, you could pull the full conversation into your Blog or Website much like the SysOps pulled the conversation into their Bulletin Board Systems from FidoNet back in the early 1990s.

Then you'd have a system where someone who comments on a story on Digg could have his comment replied to by someone viewing the original blog post, and then several people could throw their two cents in on Twitter, and the entire thread could be followed on FriendFeed.

Easier said than done by a long shot, but if we start thinking FidoNet, maybe... just maybe... it'd be a step in the right direction.

Photo by Flickr user edans