Chat paradigm idea

[Kedar Patil]

2008/12/17 Pete Tirrell <pete at fiestyturtles.com>:
>
> 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.

Me and my friend usually have 2-3 threads in one chat session. So we
follow a protocol of prefixing every message with a unique comment
leader, like in programming languages. One thread is usually the
"foreground" thread and has no prefix. Other threads may have "//" or
"#", so a conversation looks like:

me: How are you?
friend: I am fine. How's you?
me: Fine too.
me: # I am listening to song foo right now, have you heard it?
me: // BTW, I received the parcel you sent that day.
friend: # Haven't, but I recently liked song baz.
friend: What happened to our dinner plan?
me: # I too like that one
me: Plan's still in place, come over to my place.
friend: // Cool

And so on. Occassionally we become sloppy about the comment leaders
but start putting them again when sending a bunch of messages in
succession.

Maybe a plugin can thread messages based on the prefixes, but I never
felt interested in writing one.

-Kedar