I don’t like Twitter as much as forums. This is strange because they have a great deal in common: they’re actually built out of the same core components. Still, they are patently not the same, and older means of classifying channels (based on medium or media type) are increasingly difficult to apply. This prompted me to consider another way to classify collaboration channels.

Participants, content, topics: in no particular order, and often under different names, these are the core components of most collaborative channels. Twitter has tweeps who tweet, sometimes about topics tracked via hashtags. Forums have users who post in threads. The concept extends beyond discussion channels: LinkedIn has members who exchange personal data and opinions for various professional reasons; MS SharePoint (amongst other things) lets employees share documents relating to a range of different activities.

Ultimately, all of these channels enable people to organise interactions and the products of those interactions. Same conceptual ingredients, different recipes and outcomes. One possible visualisation is a tri-polar space in which one can plot the position of any collaboration tool by considering the relative importance it places on participants, content, and topics:

Obviously this only rough visualisation, but the intent is to illustrate how different channels emphasise different core components. Twitter, I would argue, is all about people and content (with a nod to topics), whereas forums are highly topic-centric ways of organising discussions (content).

On reflection, I gravitate towards topics, which explains my love of forums. Truth is I became most comfortable with Twitter when I began to regard it as a gigantic forum that had been shattered into millions of fragments (which one must then selectively collect and re-assemble). That’s not quite as outlandish as it sounds: if you use hashtag search columns in TweetDeck, you’re effectively recreating forum threads (topics) on the fly.

Besides my personal angst about Twitter vs. forums, I think this model might be useful for planning an organisation’s collaborative channels mix. For example: if you’re already developing a next generation corporate address book with Facebook-alike features such as status updates, you’ve probably covered the participants angle well enough to consider skipping a Twitter-alike channel; however, this may leave you light on topic-centric channels, making structured discussion forums a better complimentary choice.

What do you think about this way of looking at the relative emphasis of collaboration channels?