The above is a random image of a stream from the Rocky Mountains An interesting difference in how we communicate over whatsapp vs facebook. If i’m sad on facebook, the UI encourages you to actively post about it, people see it and then conversations happen. Sometimes people who see it weren’t intended to see it . With newsfeed, this communication style can be called a stream (akin to someone sitting by a stream and watching things flow by)

If you’re unhappy and communicating this on Whatsapp, you’re going to talk directly to someone about it and/or change your picture to something sad/emo, this change is not shown to anybody but anyone interested in knowing what you’re upto can scroll to the conversation with you and check your status. There is no unintended broadcast, this make for much for quieter sharing . This is similar to the old school bulletin board with stuff pinned for perusal.

Facebook moved away from having a status fixed at the top of your profile (now timeline) quite a while ago.  Where should we stream vs board? Streams are convenient when you want to actively communicate with a lot of people but the volume of content in a stream prevents people from getting to all of it, either because of filtering out unimportant content (eg. facebook) or scarcity of attention (eg. twitter) Boards are useful but here your behaviour is also determined by the audience of the board. A twitter bio is an example of a board that is less frequently updated and serves more like short description of your life . Contrary to that, people update Whatsapp statuses/Orkut usernames/Gtalk statuses much more frequently because its mostly visible to their frequently.

Rough post, more on this later