Kevin and I sweated profusely for over 2 hours under the punishing glare of the spotlight last night at 111 Minna Gallery, where we demoed Dyalogues to dozens of new technology enthusiasts. It was worth it! The reception was overwhelmingly positive, and we got plenty of great feedback from people who stopped by our table. And there was cold beer with which to rehydrate and bring the body temperature down below 100 degrees.

Since we had a lot of questions that might well be asked by others taking a look at Dyalogues for the first time, I thought I’d answer some frequently-asked questions. If any others come up, feel free to pop them in the comments for this blog entry, or, of course, you can send us an email.

• Who’s your target market? Who’s going to use this?

We believe that, at the beginning, bloggers and entrepreneurs will take to Dyalogues.
Bloggers are the ideal userbase, because they are comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas online, and they’re always looking to attract new readers to their blog. Each dyalogue you participate in includes an excerpt of your bio, plus followable links to your blog and elsewhere people can find you. The more popular your dyalogues, the more traffic to your blog.
Entrepreneurs are always looking for mindshare, and are often eager to share their thoughts on what’s going on in their industry with like-minded people. For instance, the owner of a green tech startup can debate with another green tech startup owner he/she knows on how best the government can spur innovation and growth in ecological technologies. The resulting dyalogue is excellent publicity for both businesses, and a highly-readable reference for interested readers.

• How is this different from having an IM/chat session with someone?

Two differences: 1) Dyalogues are not real-time, and 2) they’re public. When one person writes their response, their counterpart receives an email notifying them that it’s their turn to respond. So, the dyalogue proceeds at a pace that’s comfortable for both participants (and gives you time to write a thoughtful response). And dyalogues are public, and shareable with your friends and others. Your dyalogues will live on our site for as long as we’re around! (A bit more about the differences here)

• Why can’t I just do the same thing through email?

You should use email if you want your conversation to remain private. Dyalogues are public and are meant to be shared. They have an easy-to-read, naturally conversational format. And if you have an intriguing “dual review” or debate, you’ll probably want to share it with others, because people like intriguing conversations.

• Can’t I do the same thing on my blog?

No, not exactly. Blogs are great platforms for monologues, with an “after-speech mixer” via the comments. The blogger has the “home-field advantage”, and comments are not the best way to have an in-depth conversation between the blogger and a respondent–they’re just not set up that way (you can’t restrict a comment thread to two people). More on the differences here.

• How are participants paired up with each other?

A key aspect of Dyalogues is that when you start a dyalogue, you have complete control over whom you dyalogue with. You’ll never get paired with someone you don’t have any interest in dyaloguing with.
There are three ways you can choose your counterpart:
1) You can invite someone you already know. Just enter in their email address, and they’ll be emailed an invitation to join you in dyalogue.
2) You can invite someone who’s already a user on the site.
3) You can choose to meet someone new, and designate your dyalogue as an Open Dyalogue. A link to your topic, with description and opening statement, is listed on our Open Dyalogues page. People interested in dyaloguing with you can enter their response to your opening statement. You’ll be emailed each time someone expresses interest. When you’re ready, return to your dyalogue page and select your counterpart from among those who’ve responded.

• Can more than two people participate in a dyalogue?

No. Dyalogues are strictly limited to two people. Why? There are plenty of options to have discussions with multiple people online already (like in blog comments or discussion forums, but these have some drawbacks that Dyalogues don’t). With exactly two people, you have:
- mutual agreement to talk to each other (no trolls, spammers or noobs jumping in and derailing the discussion)
- richness and intensity of discussion (each participant must directly respond to the other)
- no distractions or noise, which tend to arise when you have dozens of people jumping in and out of the discussion
- no “mob mentality”- Dyalogues is neutral ground where each participant is shown no “home field advantage”
We will likely put in various commenting features to allow people to weigh in on the dyalogue, but these will be peripheral to the dyalogue itself, which will always remain the focus.

• Are you guys in beta? When are you going to launch?

We are about to begin our private beta, after having hammered out all the bugs with our dozen-odd alpha participants. Our private beta means we’re limiting participation to people we’ve invited, as well as those expressing interest by signing up on our index/splash page. We’re looking to open Dyalogues up to the public near the end of the year.

• What does it cost?

Nothing. We eventually plan to support the site via advertising.

We’re pleased to announce that Dyalogues will be demoing Dyalogues at SF Beta next Tuesday! You’ll even have the opportunity to set up an account, invite a friend, and begin dyaloguing. Brainstorm some debate and/or review ideas, and come have a look!

Event: SF Beta 2.6 [event blog]

Where: 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco [map]

Date: Tuesday, September 23rd

Time: 7:00-9:00 pm

Tickets are $15 online or $25 at the door. You can buy tickets online via Eventbrite.

This past week, Kevin and I took our show on the road…er, well, onto the Intertubes. A handful of our friends are currently dyaloguing on the site, and simultaneously helping us weed out those bugs we need to fix. We love what they’re writing (you will too!), and really appreciate their valuable feedback.

Many thanks to Peggy, Njoke, Seamus, Antun, Nicole, Aimee, Andy, Jonah, Malcolm, Tamara and Aaron!

We’re approaching our QA stage now, but we’d like to share a few samples, so you can get a feel for the way they look.

REVIEWS

• Arts/Entertainment > Movies/Film: The Pursuit of Happyness
• Arts/Entertainment > Books: On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

DEBATES

• Politics > US Elections: Do celebrity endorsements help or hurt presidential candidates?
• Technology > Web/Internet: Should the US Government Pass Net Neutrality Laws?
• Politics > US State Issues: Should illegal immigrants be granted driver’s licenses?

We’ll have more to share soon!

As a child of the seventies and one that has never liked blowing hard-earned money and two hours of my life on an awful movie, I was always a big fan of Siskel & Ebert’s show, At the Movies. Siskel passed on in 1999 and has since been replaced with Richard Roeper, but the two Windy City newspaper critics introduced a format of back-and-forth dual reviews that were always greater than the sum of their individual reviews in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

What made it great? Well, Gene and Roger were great critics, first and foremost. But they also had great chemistry, probing each other on their thoughts on films they loved and loathed, and challenging each other in a dynamic conversation about each films merits and failures. Of course, plenty of times they agreed, giving movies two thumbs up or two thumbs down. But sometimes the most fascinating exchanges were those where they disagreed–the friendly spats were a delight to watch.

The digital era brought an algorithmic expansion of the wisdom-of-crowds (wisdom-of-the-pair?) concept, with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic rendering a score based on the number of reviewers giving a movie a positive or negative review. But there’s still that missing dynamic exchange that we enjoyed on TV. The closest thing I’ve seen has been Bloggingheads.tv’s diavlog, but these tend to be generally discussion-oriented, as opposed to two bloggers reviewing the same movie like Siskel and Ebert did.

With Dyalogues we plan on changing that. Stay tuned.

Note: For almost a year now, the entire corpus of Siskel & Ebert, and Ebert & Roeper, reviews have been available online. Enjoy! (Here’s their review of my favorite movie; two thumbs up!)

We’ve broadly scoped dyalogues to mean any sort of back-and-forth exchange between exactly two people.

That’s pretty broad. We know. At least at the beginning, we’re launching with two formats:

• debates
• dual reviews (two people review something together; think Siskel & Ebert, or Ebert & Roeper, I guess)

There are two other formats we’ll launch down the road:

• interviews (one user interviews another)
• multi-step advice (think Dear Abby or Ann Landers, except you can ask follow-up questions)

There are some differences in the UI for each of these formats, but primarily the formats will be grouped together, so if you’re an interview fanatic, you can read interview after interview in the same section on the site. Or if you want to read what everyone has to say about the new Blackberry Pearl, then you should be able to see all of those reviews collated in the same section of the site.

There might be other formats that we’ll test down the road, as well. But these 4 are those that are on our current roadmap.

I’d like to point out an example of the sort of conversations that are happening across blogs that demonstrate the market, if you will, for dyalogues.

1. On Feb 12, Glenn Kelman, CEO of real estate startup, Redfin, compares Silicon Valley, where he spent 16 years, to Seattle, where he’s based in now.
2. Three days later, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch writes a response on his blog. Readers interested in first reading the blog post he’s responding to must follow a link to Glenn’s blog. Then they come back and read Michael’s response.
3. Glenn finds out about Michael’s post (maybe via an email from Michael, maybe by monitoring his trackback pings, maybe a tip from a friend who follows TechCrunch) and posts a response on his blog. Of course, the only people who understand the conversation absolutely clearly are those who follow both TechCrunch and the Redfin Blog, and have a pretty good memory. Everyone else has several browser windows/tabs open as they weave through the conversation chronologically.
4. Michael finds out about Glenn’s response post (again, we have no idea how) and posts a link to it at the bottom of his original post.

If this sounds complicated, it’s because it is. It’s not, by any means, an impossible conversation to follow - it’s just a bit clumsy because blogging platforms are not designed for deep interaction between bloggers. It can feel a little like an online scavenger hunt to follow the conversation.

This is where Dyalogues shines. Dyalogues is a web platform for two-way interchanges between two bloggers. The dyalogue starts with a premise and an initiator, and then proceeds in a conversation-like pattern. It’s easy to read, and the system handles notifying both parties about when the other person has responded, and when it’s time to write a reply. The conversation can proceed as quickly as the participants want it to.

We hope Michael, Glenn, and other bloggers take the time to engage with each other via a dyalogue or two, and have a permanent, easy-to-read record of it with which to share with their readers, both current and new.

Dyalogues is about getting people to talk - deeply and meaningfully. Not poking, not pinging, not IMing - we’re talking about a rich and expressive conversation, the sort of communication that is common in the offline world, but can be difficult to find online, oddly.

A couple of things I read this past week suggested we were on the same wavelength with a couple of provocative, insightful folks:

• someone I talked to said that he teased Robert Scoble for occasionally publishing blog posts with deliberately provocative titles; the Scobleizer responded, “it gets people talking”
• in a recent blog post, Scoble wrote that “The real thing I’ve been doing for more than eight years now is to try to arrange my life so that I have an interesting conversation every day with someone interesting.”
• I read a review of Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? in The Economist. It had a great quote: “For Mr Spurlock, conversation is the opposite of war while people refusing to communicate is something to fear.”
• In an interview with Screen Goblin, Spurlock states, “[Filming the movie] really hit home on a different level for me sitting down and talking to people face-to-face, rather than seeing people yell about it on TV. When you’re there - you’re sitting down, or you’re at a table, or you’re in someone’s house and they’re telling you face-to-face and you can’t change the channel, you can’t go into the other room - it gives you a completely new perspective.”

We couldn’t agree more.

• Dyalogues are between exactly two people. Unlike open threaded discussions, where anyone can pipe into a discussion, a dyalogue is a back-and-forth interchange between just two people. Other people can leave comments at the end, but they can not participate in the dyalogue itself.
• Dyalogues can not be easily derailed. Because there are only two people participating, a third person (or fourth, or twenty-eighth) can’t step into a healthy exchange and interrupt it, force it off onto a tangent, or otherwise disrupt the two-way exchange.
• Dyalogues don’t have a “mob mentality”. Because the focus and ownership of a dyalogue is with the two participants only, a mob of sympathizers of one of the participants can not ridicule, harrass or ignore the participants. (They can try to do so in the comments, but that section has little power to sway the dyalogue itself)
• Dyalogues are easy to follow. Try to follow an interchange between two people in a threaded discussion forum. They do happen, usually using ever-increasing quotes and “@ user” intros, but usually they’re difficult to read clearly.

This is not to say threaded discussions suck. They’re awesome. They allow the sort of round-table, group discussion that’s almost impossible in the real world. But if you’re trying to engage deeply with one person in particular, you are probably better served taking your discussion into a dyalogue instead.

• Dyalogues are deeper. They are not real-time, so you’ll have a bit more time to think through your response and write a reply that is well-reasoned and substantial.

• Dyalogues are public. They are meant to be enjoyed by anyone that could be interested in what you have to say on the dyalogue topic.

• Dyalogues are topical. They are an exchange between two people on a specific topic.

IMing is great for informal, private chit-chat; Dyalogues are great for a meaty, publicly-readable discussion.