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Context retrieval
Oct. 2nd, 2002 11:36 pmI love the net. One of the things I love most about it is the asynchronous communication it allows. Most human communication is synchronous - you're in one conversation and it carries on until it's over. Not on the net. With email, you can reply at will, and it just sits there until you deal with it. The same is true of Newsgroups. LJ even more so.
But one form of communication that's asynchronous, even though it frequently pretends to be synchronous, is Messenger. I'm including AIM, YM, MSN, Jabber and 500 other IM products here. I just got this in an MSN window:
I had to think about this for about 5 seconds before realising he was replying to my suggestion for a free antivirus program. A suggestion I'd made an hour earlier, in a different instance on MSN, on a different computer.
Email carries context if you quote the previous message. Newsgroups pretty much always do this. IM doesn't. I wonder if it ought to. I once spent some time designing a theoretical chat program that stored context for your discussions, including branching ones. I never did anything with it, because I'm a procrastinating son of a bitch, but it was a neat idea, kinda like usenet, kinda like IM, but more useful than either. I wonder if anything like it will ever actually happen.
But one form of communication that's asynchronous, even though it frequently pretends to be synchronous, is Messenger. I'm including AIM, YM, MSN, Jabber and 500 other IM products here. I just got this in an MSN window:
Nathan says:
thats the one, ta!
I had to think about this for about 5 seconds before realising he was replying to my suggestion for a free antivirus program. A suggestion I'd made an hour earlier, in a different instance on MSN, on a different computer.
Email carries context if you quote the previous message. Newsgroups pretty much always do this. IM doesn't. I wonder if it ought to. I once spent some time designing a theoretical chat program that stored context for your discussions, including branching ones. I never did anything with it, because I'm a procrastinating son of a bitch, but it was a neat idea, kinda like usenet, kinda like IM, but more useful than either. I wonder if anything like it will ever actually happen.
