Beyond the Bubble

Evolving Our Conversations

Have you ever paused to consider the many of ways through which you communicate with other people? In my case, I use ten different apps on a weekly basis to connect with my family, friends, work colleagues, and many online communities, including here on LinkedIn. These applications essentially serve very similar purposes, like text messaging, video calling, viewing and sharing content.

Personally, I find it burdensome to keep track of the different conversations happening between them, and it leaves me longing for the simpler days of the internet when we were just figuring out what to do online. It was a more innocent time when our activities and shared interests weren't yet being boxed up and sold into discrete walled off networks powered by ads and subscriptions.

Last week however, another app entered this noisy space: a "Twitter-like microblogging experience " by Meta called Threads , which reportedly had over 100 million downloads two days after its launch.

Nowadays, it is common to feel that connecting to community that interests you, means scrolling endlessly through an algorithmically curated feed. Like most of us, I have also fallen into this trap, but have started taking small steps to change course. For me, it means connecting with people more often through travel, exhibits, conferences, and one-on-one meetings.

But, what about improvements to how we connect digitally? Is there a way forward that feels more human? What if people, rather than apps, became the focal point of our interactions? And since it is unlikely that we will have fewer ways to communicate in the future, what if our identity, contacts, and the ideas we shared with others in past conversations could seamlessly travel with us between platforms? From Instagram, to Discord, to LinkedIn, to WhatsApp, and Threads?

Setting aside my work-related interactions, which don't truly belong to me, I believe that my personal conversations constitute my data. Therefore, why not carry this context and knowledge with me wherever I go on the internet? I was pleased, yet surprised when I learned that Threads will adopt ActivityPub , which in short is a positive step towards decentralizing social networking. Another way to put it is that it is "a technology through which social networks can be made interoperable, connecting everything to a single social graph and content-sharing system."

One of the key reasons why this matters is that today we prefer keeping our discrete accounts and personas separate, allowing, for instance, one's affinity for video games to be separate from their activities as a designer. However, soon enough, we might think differently. The data we leave behind will become even more valuable as generative AI tools and agents begin considering the context of our chats to bring us unprecedented value.

The last decade has encouraged us to consolidate our usage to fewer platforms, but I hope that ActivityPub may instead start blurring the lines between applications and, in turn, reinforce data ownership. This not only gives equal value to both the tools themselves and what we contribute to them but also accelerates the potential for AI to be more deeply personalized.

Since I have written about some of these overlapping topics before (here and here ), why not use this opportunity to tease how we may want to rethink the shape and structure of our digital conversations? After all, we have been exchanging chat bubbles for nearly twenty years. ??

Multi-media Stream of Consciousness

Between YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, the signal is clear: video reigns supreme! ?? The same holds true for communication apps that seamlessly incorporate video calling, following the path paved by Skype in its early days.

Video offers ways for people to connect, share ideas, and get alignment in ways that audio alone can quite accomplish. However, I am not alone in my excitement for the innovations that have yet to come. More specifically, I wonder about the fact that synchronous chat, video, and content sharing are still trapped in their own distinct windows, and whether there is an opportunity to create a more blended user experience. I find this very relevant to today's hybrid reality, where we aren't together in the same room, and where the entire context of a conversation is split into different components.

What if we could we lean into this some more to make our connections in real-time more engaging? Could tomorrow's conversations feel more like a multi-user real-time stream of ideas, and could such ideas materialize in multi-media and multi-sensory ways?

As the image above illustrates, there is a growing set of things we are sharing with each other alongside video, and with generative AI starting to permeate our conversations, it opens the doors for lots of new and interesting things to happen. At the most basic level, it could bring even more authenticity to the way we express things to one another. For example, a generative system could create one-of-a-kind emojis in real-time, enabling more unique and contextual reactions. Having worked on Fluent's emoji system , I know firsthand that there is no shortage of wishes for new ones, let alone new contexts in which an emoji could be used.

More interestingly, there is potential for group conversations to be made out of individualized smart streams. These AI-powered streams would connect people by presenting their video streams (or avatars) embedded with chat, content being presented, and other expressions and reactions, all fused into one expressive feed. Spoken or written content, along with the context extracted from discussions, could also be adapted into a preferred voice and tone. This personalized and contextual approach could make some conversations less noisy, and easier to parse content and participate in real-time or asynchronously. In fact, if we observe the incoming generations' use of video streaming platforms like YouTube, we can already begin seeing some of these early patterns emerging. What is missing, is the UX to support it.

In summary, I know we aren't yet witnessing the death of plain text ??, but it seems clear that our future conversations will become increasingly more AI-enhanced and multi-media. What are some of the future trends you are noticing in this space? I would love to hear your insights in the comments. ??

Ser·en·dip·i·tous Interactions

With the two ingredients mentioned above - the ability to bring my conversations (from any platform) along with me, and a more enticing, multi-media, and multi-sensory way to connect with others - there is one more thing that I could imagine being invaluable: a more intuitive way to establish unplanned connections with others.

When was the last time you were looking for the right person who could bring lots of clarity to a topic you're interested in? And I mean a real human, not ChatGPT. ?? It happens to me regularly, and sometimes it can take one, two, or more weeks before I get to connect with that someone. While exploring the topic of human connections, I stumbled upon this illuminating episode of Hidden Brain with psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, where she talks about The Power of Tiny Interactions. Essentially, her research pointed out the differences between so-called "strong ties" and "weak ties." The former being your family, friends, and co-workers with whom you often collaborate, and the latter being those whom you might see sporadically at the coffee shop and other common places, but whose name you might not even know.

It turned out that, on average, people with more weak tie interactions in their day tend to be happier than those who focused exclusively on strong ties. Not only happier, but overall, they were exposed to new stories and information and had richer life experiences, all of which led to more positive surprises in their lives, an overall higher satisfaction with their life outcome, and better mental health. ??

I found this topic so illuminating because, all of a sudden, in my new post-pandemic remote work reality, I found myself missing out on those weak tie interactions. Could there be a way to bring them back into our daily digital lives?

Can we make our communication experiences work a little harder at creating new connections with purpose, by empowering people to find one another in more proactive ways versus reactive ways?

I leave you with these questions and hope to hear your reactions in the comments. ???

Thank you for reading!

Illustrations made with Figma ?? & Procreate ??