DISQUS

cathodion · 2 months ago

I know nothing about Google Wave, but let me daydream for a moment. What if e-mail was more like the web? Every message has a URL and is either public, public-within-your-organization, or public-to-its-CC-list. Your "inbox" becomes more like an RSS feed. You tag messages like in Del.icio.us (if they're not auto-tagged like in g-mail). Every chat conversation has a URL as well and has the same kind of access options, plus some configurable level of permanence. Every message and conversation is googible or findable by its tags.

Is this something like what Wave is supposed to be?

I think this doesn't solve the "I need to be 'Available' in IM" problem though. Some of that (like some of the problem with e-mail) is more of an organizational problem than a technical one.

justindz · 2 months ago

I think the idea here, in a nutshell, is to start from a framework of
electronic communications that are universally threaded,
collaborative, searchable and indexed across history (so you can
revisit how the conversation evolved). It would make the distinction
between chat and email less important. Messages would be real-time
and all would have the same basic level of permanence. You could also
conclude a discussion by editing out all the noise and providing a
final summation, such that anyone revisiting the conversation would
see the summation and only if they were curious for some reason would
they roll back the timeline to see how it got there.

Regarding your thoughts on URLs, etc., I suppose that's just a general
RESTful API of some sort on top of the data repository, so I would
guess that's doable.

cathodion · 2 months ago

(I really hate that word, RESTful)

I really meant being able to visit it like a web page, using a web browser, but I suppose an API would be useful too.

cathodion · 2 months ago

Here's some related wonkiness. I reply to your blog post using disqus, which then generates an e-mail, which I receive a notification about through my IM client. I know it's a response to the disqus post, but I need to go to my inbox to discharge the IM notification, click the link to go back to the blog post, and then archive the e-mail so it won't clutter my inbox.

justindz · 2 months ago

RESTful is annoying, but people understand what it means when you say
it. By people, here, I mean people who are familiar with
representation state transfer concepts. And, I think we're saying the
same thing. There would be an address for a conversation which could
be used as a reference for both human and machine reading of the
content.

cathodion · 2 months ago

Yeah, I agree that we agree. I just need to stop getting annoyed about
words (I'm looking at you, Worcestershire!).

Mike Moore · 2 months ago

I hate MOC. The client itself seems like they threw it together in a day, then spent a month making it look pretty. They should have put more time into usability, and especially support tabbed chat windows as an option (ideally as nicely implemented as tabs in Google Chrome).

But no, it just sucks. hard.

justindz · 2 months ago

One of its biggest flaws is simply that of not working a lot.