Dangling conversations

Can Third Voice's approach to Web community evolve beyond drive-by scrawls and spam?

By Janelle Brown

Jul 7, 1999 | When the Third Voice home page listed Gay.com as the most popular conversation destination for its community members, I automatically assumed the worst.

Third Voice is the "inline discussion" service that enables users to append notes to Web pages and read the messages others have left behind. The technology, which has been wowing the Silicon Valley press since its debut in May, works on top of a browser, to modify the way you see the Web and interact with others online.

It's a nifty technology -- allowing you to articulate your thoughts on, say, the war in Kosovo on top of CNN's news page -- but my initial experiences with Third Voice had left me unimpressed with the kind of dialogue taking place. Third Voice is touting its eponymous product as the next great thing to happen to the online community. But in its first months, it has attracted primarily flame wars, spam and juvenile graffiti.

So, after spending a few hours trolling the Web with Third Voice, scrolling through endless pages of throw-away posts, I came to the Gay.com community site expecting to witness an outpouring of homophobic epithets. Instead, I came across a thought-provoking discussion about whether there was a need for Gay Pride marches, and what the ramifications of a Hetero-Pride march might be. There were signs of intelligent life after all.

Third Voice and its new competitor, the 3-week-old Gooey, promise to totally change the way we perceive online interaction. Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, whose firm invested in Third Voice, goes so far as to call it "a radical paradigm shift." But, much like Usenet and chat rooms before them, the services are in danger of being buried by inanities.

"The Net is a platform for all kinds of innovation, including social innovations, and they emerge and survive in the Darwinian manner," says "The Virtual Community" author Howard Rheingold. "Like all technologies, there are advantages, and there are shadows" to these new tools, he says. Right now, the shadows are apparent; the question is whether the advantages will eventually be realized, too. As it stands now, conversations like the one I found at Gay.com are still in the minority.

The conversations take place in a kind of "transparency" that sits on top of your browser, where visitors can leave messages on public "sticky notes." You can either pop open the notes individually as you come across them on the Web page, or methodically scroll through threaded discussions using the discreet toolbar that sits on the edge of your browser. Eng-Siong Tan, CEO of Third Voice, calls this a "readers dimension," the ultimate omnipresent community-building tool.

And for advertisers, Third Voice offers yet another banner space. But this one, anticipates Jurvetson, will bring in 100 times greater advertising rates because of the pervasiveness of the medium. The information Third Voice can gather about its users' surfing and purchasing habits is far greater than any one Web site could ever gather.

Next Page: Can Third Voice tame flamers without resorting to censorship?

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