Interview Your Contacts

Whether for professional purposes or for fun any discussion between two people could be viewed as an informal interview in which opinion and/or information is exchanged. Interviews are not only a formal discussion between a journalist and a celebrity; it can also be a chat between two friends, or two colleagues. What matters is the information contained in such interviews and how valuable it is for the public.

Obviously interviewing has many forms, it can be on TV, in a newspaper or magazine, and it can also be online! With the unprecedented success of the internet and the adoption of the web, there is no reason that interviews can’t be done online.

Actually, informal interviews have been practiced since the early days of internet through the chatting services. The only difference from the formal ones, other than the style of course, is the persistency of the interview. While the latter are published and made available to virtually anyone to read, the former was mostly confined to the private domain.

There‘s no doubt that chatting is a form of interview. Even if it does not involve a well-known celebrity or an experienced journalist, nevertheless it still can contain valuable information that could benefit others.

Consider an example where one is asking his colleague about technical matter related to a certain project. Sometimes this exchange is done via email but there are other times when it is done over a chatting service like MSN. The best thing to do at the end is to publish this discussion that can be also thought as an interview. Even though there are no nationally or internationally known figures involved, however the contributors are valuable to their colleagues and other project members, and their issue they discussed is certainly important to them.

www.SimpleConnexion.com concept goes into this direction and tries to promote the concept of publishing added value discussions.

Chatting or Blogging

This might seem odd to compare two distinct activities. One might think like comparing apples to oranges! Although at first this appears to be the case, but when looking closer, some similarities emerge to the surface.

Blogs (web logs) are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.

On the other hand online chat can refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, but is primarily meant to refer to direct one-on-one chat or text-based group chat , using tools such as instant messengers, Internet Relay Chat, talkers and possibly multiple user dungeons (MUD)s. The expression online chat comes from the word chat which means "informal conversation".

So the differences between blogs and chat are persistency and formality. Blogs are persistent meaning they exist on a webpage and they can be accessed any time. They are also formal (at least a good part of them) and they address a whole audience and not a particular person. On the contrary, chat is transient, ephemeral; it does not live beyond the life of a discussion and of course the majority of the chat is informal.

Although differences seem to weigh considerably, similarities on the other hand exist. Blogging and chatting can both carry information that is valuable to others. Meaning, a person seeking a piece of information or looking to solve a problem, can find it either on a blog or in a chat room. The only concern related to the chat is that the info might have passed or not yet arrived so the timing is critical.

However, this can be solved by simply saving a discussion and convert it into an informal blog. This method offers good benefits to the reader because he will be seeing an interaction between two people and this means some specific questions and clarifications might be also evoked in the course of the discussion. To the person who is giving this information he is freed of the task of writing formal blog.

In this context www.SimpleConnexion.com is looking to promote this concept.

Twitter Source of Discussion

Beyond any doubt Twitter is the number one service in microblogging. With its 50million tweets a day it sits on top of “traffic chain” (term borrowed from “food chain”) and constitutes an enormous source of information.

Actually Twitter stream is a mixture of information and opinions, where a measure of the information popularity is possible thanks to the retweeting. However there is a gap in this system! Tweets are not long living. In fact their life expectation does not exceed few seconds. So catching a tweet among 50millions is like searching for a needle in a hay stack.

Because tweets carry information and information might be useful to different other people, they might use it in different ways according to their needs and objectives.

One of these objectives is to discuss information contained in the tweets and exchange opinions about them. One method to that is to reply to the original tweet with a comment. The drawback of this method is the lack of interactivity. The source of the tweet might not be available for replying or might be simply uninterested. On the other hand some other people might be happy to discuss it, but the problem is how to find them?
Besides of information a tweet carry an opinion. People interested in some news or information are logically tempted to tweet them. In other words what they do is bind their own preferences within the tweets. These people are more likely ready to talk about their tweets and discuss them.

Many products and services are trying to benefit from these two features. One of them is www.SimpleConnexion.com that tries to create discussions between people around a certain tweet.

Q&A websites review

Social networking ideas are hatching everywhere. Basically there are endless ways to bring people together, the aim is to let people meet, discuss and interact.

The new trend nowadays is the Questions & Answers websites. People with questions go there ask them and people who have answers, whether right or wrong, reply.

Forums have been doing that for ages, but with a major difference. Forums are most of the time specialized, so you find IT forums, medical forums, parental forums etc… If you have a question first you need to find the right forum for yourself. Then you have to subscribe, create a thread and post your question. This might seem tedious for those who need a fast answer.

Questions & Answers websites have another approach to the problem. You go find any of these websites, you still have to subscribe or login using your Facebook account for those who support Facebook Connect. Then you ask your question. The website will take charge of finding people who might answer it. It alleviates the task of finding the right place and the right people.

Forums are still very efficient when you have a very specific question. For example if you are a developer and looking to solve a problem, it is by far better if you search for it in a specialized forum, because all its members are IT professionals.

Conversely if you have general question related to an event, celebrity or broad business Q&A sites will be useful for you, because they gather people from different domains and backgrounds.

Another major benefit of the Q&A is socializing. Because people might have general questions there is a better chance to create a discussion. While specific question means that you are mostly interested in a good answer that solves your problem without having the time to chitchat.
There are many Q&A websites out there but the most known are Quora.com and Vark.com.

However the drawback that lacks behind is the absence of direct one to one discussion with interesting people. This is where http://www.simpleconnexion.com/ is trying to solve.