Chat paradigm idea

[Pete Tirrell]

Hello all!  I've been using Pidgin for a long time now, and love it.  My
coworker and I were discussing something this morning, and I wanted to throw
out on the board for discussion since I'm not sure where else I might put
something like it.  Anyway....

I notice that a lot of my chat conversations with people bounce around from
topic to topic, within the same chat session.  Maybe it's my lack of focus
or ADD or stream of consciousness or something....but even with a one on one
with someone I'll rattle off 2 or three different points, and then he'll
respond to a couple, I'll respond to one of those, then the other after
we've gone back and forth on one of the earlier points, etc...  All in all
it can make for a disjointing linear conversation.  I keep track of it, but
it led me to this thought:

What if there were a way to "thread" chat conversations?  I have no idea how
this would work, or what kind of UI could possibly make it easy to
understand, but I thought that if within a single conversation with someone,
if there were a way to keep track of different "threads" within that
converstion, it could be really cool.  I'm not aware of any sort of chat
client mechanism that does something like this.

I'm sure it's a crazy idea, full of holes, but thought I'd throw it out for
discussion.  Enjoy!
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