Chat paradigm idea

Felipe Contreras felipe.contreras at gmail.com
Sat Dec 20 07:32:04 EST 2008


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

That's a great idea!

I would like to be able to reply to specific messages... sometimes
answering a previous message creates confusion.

Unfortunately I think that requires protocol support. Either the two
sides support it unofficially or it goes into an open protocol like
XMPP.

-- 
Felipe Contreras




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