Mix07 had a panel discussion on what they called "two way conversations" (can a conversation be one way?) that at the time was reasonably interesting. However it is one of the sessions that has stayed with me and got me thinking after the event.
There was an initial discussion on closed vs open - which boiled down to open APIs are good at facilitating communities. I like to try and compare these concepts to the real world - and I guess an open API is a way of providing new places for unfamiliar people to meet and talk, so for me that might a train journey, a conference, a business meeting, a dinner party, a pub. Each is a situation framed by a context, and I suppose you could relate that to the way one site integrates an api.
The whole idea of conversations through technology is an intriguing one and I think one that is still quite immature. Twitter, which I certainly enjoy, is a very simple conversation (if you can call it even call it a conversation - since it is often just a broadcast of what you are doing now); it's not one that you would particularly have in the real word, but that is perhaps it’s appeal, together with the voyeuristic aspect.
Other sites like Facebook provide richer functionality, more tools, and more ways to communicate, but there is a general focus I think on quite unstructured talk - really like a virtual meeting place where people just get together to talk about things in their world, and the tools facilitate that.
However in the real world, conversations can be very structured. When talking to a local authority about planning permission for example, or where ordering a product. That structure can be managed by paper based or electronic forms and responses could be paper, email or voice. But there is scope there for richer structured conversation managed by technology. Our own Mediaklik product attempts to do that by letting citizens start the conversation visually through an MMS message from their phone, and then have resonses via email, sms or web. Behind the scenes integration to external APIs will start conversations with other systems. In this sense we are open rather than closed, but in a more restricted way governed by commercial contraints. Groove too provides ways of building more structured communications.
Conversations (or communications) via technology seems to be an undelying theme to many new innovations and is an area that is worth embracing.
Ian