Marc riffs on the recent Handwave at Synchronous Social Software, although not about the synchronous aspect of what I was pushing at, but on the geolocation element:

[from Plazes, Gush, and Blog Comment Threading

His wish list goes on to include the 'best of breed' features of IM, geolocation services, RSS feeds, generic presence and trigger alert info, combining the capabilities of Plazes and Gush.

I have two separate sets of comments to make on this... one about the content, and one about where and how I make these comments (!).

Regarding the content: Stowe's wish-list is right on the money -- it deserves a more thoughtful reply than I can give it at the moment, so I merely wanted to flag a few other things swirling around in that space that are starting to address these same needs:

a) BuddySpace, naturally, with its location-centric presence info... not with 'live map' updates yet, but those are coming soon!!

b) Live IP -> Latitude/longitude information can be supplied more easily than the custom app you need to download for Plazes: check out the 'HitMap' in the upper right corner of my blog, which knows where visitors to my page come from, without them having to do anything.... cool, huh? This comes from KMi's Jiri Komzak, the same guy who implemented BuddySpace, and is described some more on KMi's HitMaps page.

c) Updating my colleagues regarding my past/current/future locations? Check out the map in the lower right of my blog gutter, which does exactly this, courtesy Bryan Boyer's IndyJunior!

Regarding Indy Junior -- too much work, man! Editing XML docs and figuring out the coordinates is too hard. But the guys at Plazes could keep a history of my logging in at various Plazes, and depict it as a part of my profile. They do parts of that already, including showing a daily update of new plazes on world and continental maps.

But then Marc wanders off into strange territory, first of all acting apologetic for his writing the post at My Dog, and not here at Get Real, where he is *supposed* to be guest blogging. But the tension inherent in the decision making about whether to blog here or there has led to some interesting speculations about the difficulties inherent in following cross blogthreads:

I'm continually amazed at the fact that blog comment discussion threads are such cumbersome beasts. I wrote previously with pointers to Jon Udell's comments on this and the new generation of Feedster and Bloglines citation bookmarklets. The challenge is to 'slice through the spaghetti' and obtain a sensible view of an emerging discussion thread, even though it is posted in disparate blog entries.

Citation bookmarklets are a stab in the right direction, but they are still too cumbersome. Blogs have the advantage of preserving a sense of self-ownership (hence my posting here rather than in a comment on someone else's blog). Forums and discussion threads have the advantage of preserving some semblance of context. Feeds have the advantage of providing steroid-driven-navigation. There are times and contexts in which any of these may be superior to the others. I think a good challenge is to let the user 'in situ' construct a mix of perspectives, i.e. peruse an 'in-line' (constructed-on-the-fly) comment-thread while reading a blog entry, rather than having to play detective, peruse feeds, or invoke a bookmarklet.

Toward this end, I have been brainstorming over the last few days with Bertrand Sereno, who is experimenting with semantic blogging. He's looking at ways to link blog entries together with semantic tags rather than mere faceless links or trackback pointers: tags that say something about why I'm linking to another entry. A challenge I've posed to Bertrand is to begin at the bookmarklet level and allow the two of us (or more if others join in) to carry on our brainstorming by means of parallel or 'yoked' blog entries, from which our discussion thread can be reconstructed on-demand. Another thing Bertrand is looking at in this respect is the notion of 'free-form' tags a la Flickr and del.icio.us, i.e. tags that are not constrained to be from a limited 'semantically credible' subset in the eyes of some High Priest of Ontology, but rather constructed at whim, in order to see what kind of tagging system evolves.

But what about various blogthreads efforts, like Dave Sifry's Technorati search embedded in MT (which David Weinberger calls "Threadorati")? [Note: I have added threadorati to Get Real, just now, so we can see what happens.]