Connecting with people online has certainly changed in the past 15-17 years. My first internet-connected computer came with Prodigy, and I still remember speaking with people through their online message boards. The only way to communicate with people on the message boards was through email, but this service provided a great way to communicate with people online, and share information that aligned with your interests. 

Around the mid-to-late 90’s, chat rooms and instant messaging took off, and services such as Yahoo chat and ICQ became extremely popular on my college campus. These two services could replace message boards and email (for 1-on-1 communication), as you could meet people in real-time by entering an interest-based chat room, and keep communication going through instant messaging.

Blogs and RSS feeds started to gain popularity after the new century, allowing everyone to talk about their interests from their own platform. People who enjoyed their writing (or aligned with their interests) subscribed to the author’s postings, receiving updates through their RSS reader. 

Today, social websites are starting to complement blogs and RSS feeds. Searching websites such as Twitter or Quora, you can easily find information and discussion about any topic that interests you.

Taking a quick look back through time, I believe that while it’s become much easier to find information and content related to your interests (what you are looking for), it’s become much more difficult to connect with the person who wrote it, long-term. In other words, it’s much easier for people to find what you wrote, but it’s much harder to retain those people when you write other material, even if the reader’s interest in that material is high. I think this is a problem, because people who share their knowledge and write content have goals and reasons for doing it. For many, the ability to retain an audience is crucial to their end goals.

Why is it difficult to retain the audience? When message boards, email and IM were the primary communication method, it was more difficult to discover new people with success. However, the 1-to-1 communication made it easier to maintain communication. In today’s 1-to-many communication environment, it’s much easier to move on to the next 1-to-many discussion instead of seeing what else the original poster has to communicate.

For example, I enjoy reading about startups and entrepreneurship. If you’re also interested in startups, a great blog to read is How to make it as a first-time entrepreneur by Vinicius Vacanti (who co-founded Yipit). A few weeks ago, I started thinking about how I found Mr. Vacanti’s blog, and realized that it was pure, dumb luck. Somehow, I ended up following him on Twitter, but never checked out his blog or other writings. It was luck that I caught his posting about How to get your first 1000 users. After reading that article, I started clicking through his other links and found articles on other topics that interested me, from other websites that he found interesting. If I wouldn’t have taken the time to discover his other writings, I wouldn’t have found this wealth of information.

Today, it’s just easier to move on to the next “1-to-many” conversation or discussion then discover more content from a particular writer, and websites like Twitter and Quora provide some social proof to much of the content you see.

So what’s needed? A few items are listed below.

• A place that allows users to easily see content people have authored, as well as comments they have made.
• Compile and provide access to the content, no matter where the person wrote it. This is crucial, as many people write on several social sites (from Quora, Twitter, StackExchange, blogs, etc). 
• The ability to provide social proof on an individual piece of content, which allows users to skip content that may not meet their interest.

Many websites provide the capability for some bullets, but not all. When you meet all three, you have the capability to connect with people, not by who they follow, but by the content and interests that each person shares. I feel this is an amazing way to discover and share information. By discovering and sharing information with a wider audience, we help the people who contribute the information meet their goals, no matter what they are.

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