What you should know about Facebook Voice Audio Comments: Delivering Happiness.

[Oct 2021 update: most of what I wrote here still holds true today, except my back-then cringe-worthy writing. Keeping this post up for posterity, and fun.]

A Brief History of the Evolution of Communication.

A few days ago, I was bored to death in a coffee shop. Mainly because everyone was talking out loud.

But they were talking.

Not texting (except a few nerds), but TALKING. Voice talking.

It’s kinda the natural way we communicate. I won’t get into the details of how communication started, you can read it about it here when you’re done reading this, but evolution dictates that what started with cave paintings should end with thought message passing, not texting and writing, going through sound communication.

The Great Alexander Graham Bell changed the way we communicate with sound, but, we took a “Historical detour”.

A “Historical detour” in Communication

Modern time Telegraphy started with Telegrams. Voice channels we not that cheap back in the 19th century. Actually, they were none until June 2nd 1875. Commercial ones started a few years later.

My point is, as we progressed towards the Telephone and long-distance voice communication, came the Internet. Again, with another sort of Telegraphy: E-mail. Few can argue that sending E-mail is faster and cheaper than making a Skype call. But in our Era of 4G and Fiber optics Internet?

E-mail was a transition to more “sophisticated ways” of communication.

But we got STUCK. Instant Messaging tools became evolved around text-based-communication. A few ones discarded this (Viber, Skype, Google Hangouts, Tango, …). But the main traffic remained texting and writing. Question is, WHY.

Sending texts in the 21th Century and the Virtual Attributes Theory.

SMS, E-mail, Whatsapp messages, Facebook comments. What do they all have in common ?

They’re all text based, and data cost is low, moreover, they keep the sender shielded.

What ?

Social Media personas are being created, curated, and developed every day. They’re based on virtual attributes: username (name in case of Facebook), profile picture, a few statuses and messages, maybe some posts shared, articles liked … One can pretty much create and curate a virtual persona in no time. Create his own Virtual Attributes in no time. They act like a Mask (c.f. Building Virtual Communities).

What’s interesting enough is the fact that most users are ashamed of their voices. An experiment I did a few months back suggested that almost everyone listens to themselves the same way you listen to yourself: “I sound weird“. Everyone sounds weird to themselves. Except maybe singers (“I sound amazing”).

Bringing the fun back to Social : Talk & Comment

Talk & Comment

But Audio is fun. Playing with your voice is fun. But mostly

“Emotion is carried less by the linguistic meaning of a word than by the way in which the sound is communicated.”

Plainly, your voice can persuade and communicate better than what you write. Think of it as reading a book vs listening to an audio book; Often the latter comes with greater emotions and more imagination.

When Whatsapp launched the Push-to-talk feature, that’s all I used onward. I found it Awesome. And my buddies found me hilarious. I’m not.

24Hours ago I launched an experiment, called: Talk & Comment. It’s the Push-To-Talk ported to Facebook comments. <Note: I started it working on it back in that crowded coffee shop>.

It got somewhere like ~500 users and 4000 voice comments. In 24Hours.

Of course that’s not huge. I didn’t create a fuss about it (as it’s still an experiment).

Delivering Happiness, one comment at a time.

But the interesting part was the way people interacted with it. It was highly unpredictable.

They were having Fun again on Facebook. Either by making silly sounds, and sending real laughs, or arguing whether or not God existed. Overall, it was a new experience (especially that it integrates seamlessly with Facebook, and everyone can read the voice comment even if not having installed the extension).

Change won’t be coming overnight. Not even in the next month, or few months. But my bet that it’s coming. Embrace it :-)

You can download Talk and Comment for Chrome here. A future post will go into technical details and challenges.

Comments and feedback are highly welcome, as always. 

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12 Comments

    1. in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”He repeatedly vowed “you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.””

      1. when he is around his friends, like he doesnt care about me, but when its just me and him talking he is alot nicer. (But alot of guys do that) Anyways he has a girlfriend who goes away to school in a different state and I heard through the grapevine that she is a snob, a slut, and she cheated on all of her ex boyefirnds! What should I do to try and get him to talk to me? I miss him so much & I really believe that we are meant to be together! Has anyone ever dated there ex again after breaking up for a while?? Please help!!

    2. Villanelo:Hombre, mas que para el ipad, yo lo usaria para ir a la compra sin necesidad de llevar el coche, para no tener que llevar mochila a clase, para llevar el barril de cerveza a casa de unos amigos a ver unas pelis… o para transportar cualquier otro tipo de utensilio de gran tamaño! Total, por muy grande que sea lo que tienes que llevar JAMAS sera tan grande como un ipad…

    3. circles of law red pumps and open-toed shoes are considered provocative. The best advice is: wear a skirt suit. The skirt should not be too short. To test the hemline, pull up a chair in the dressing room and

    4. Moi j ai amené ma PS3 au sav et j avais oublié de retirer le jeux à l’intérieur (et oui ça arrive même au meilleurs) à savoir call of duty moderne warfare !!!!Quand j’ai récupéré ma PS3 il y avait bien mon jeux mais en anglais !!!!

    5. "Un giornalista non presenta tutti i punti di vista. Se lo fa, è un passacarte e la sua funzione è inutile."Sono sostanzialmente d'accordo con te. Forse "passacarte" è eccessivo, diciamo "riorganizzatore" :DTemo che, almeno per quanto riguarda Minoli, sia l'effetto collaterale di alcuni eventi delittuosi svoltisi nel passato in Italia, mai completamente chiariti, come ad esempio la strage di Bologna e quella di Ustica.

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