

The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next - edw519
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_man_who_made_gmail_says_real-time_conversation.php

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ComputerGuru
The difference between IRC and everything else is the organization of it all.

It's hard to track and organize real-time conversations.. they start off in
one place and end up in another. And then even if that's fine, it's impossible
to then categorize the results in any meaningful way that makes it easy for
_others_ not a part of the original discussion to go back and view the details
of the (large) conversation.

The nature of emails and other "turn-based communication systems" makes people
tend to make each individual "element" of the thread a standalone entity. A
single has way better odds of making sense on its own than a single IRC
message...

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axod
They're very different forms of communication, suited to different uses. It's
like telephone vs letter. Each has its place.

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joepestro
The idea of real time communication is similar to IRC, but remember that it's
just a protocol. The big difference here is what you can do with how that data
is presented to users.

There are some really neat things you can do with HTTP and a browser that IRC
clients lack. The whole rendering a page with text, images, and markup
together adds a lot to the experience that you just don't get with IRC. Great
job friendfeed - it looks like this brings together the strengths of each.

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pyr3
Look at Adium (which is IM, but I don't think IRC) and Colloquy (IRC and SILC)
on OSX. They output chat to XML which is then 'themed' with XSLT into HTML to
display in a Webkit frame.

It sounds really convoluted, but it's presented in HTML form. and you _can_
use images etc.

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jaytee_clone
Of course, real time is a better form of communication.

But then, why don't we just stop using emails, just do video conference, or
better yet face-to-face meetings?

Because there are other limiting factors. For example, no one has the time to
have real-time conversation all the time. Real-time also limits the amount of
people you can effectively communicate with.

That's why we have email/forum/tweet, because they serve different
functionality.

Thus, real-time communication will never replace static communication as long
as such intrinsic logistic limits exist.

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marcellmars
push news:// & irc:// to the masses through jabber/json rendered in browser...

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mahmud
mibbit covers IRC, but you can clean up usenet now that google wont implement
even the most rudimentary forms of spam blocking.

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ralph
I still think the Friendfeed site does a poor job of getting across what it
does and why it's useful. This readwriteweb article is better. They need some
real-life examples, not just waffle about family and work groups. Can I use it
instead of a blog, or is it as well as? If I can see the comments other
friends are making elsewhere then do my comments on FF get pushed out to those
things I'm on, e.g. twitter? That kind of thing needs to be covered, and
without me watching a video or screencast.

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nopal
The Man Who Made the Postcard Says "Telephonic Conversation" is What's Next

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galtenberg
So when will Google officially make this their social network?

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tumult
The Brazilians will just take it from us again :)

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mahmud
I tell my chinese friends I'm on QQ (their local AIM/Y!IM conglomerate) and I
tell my brazilian friends I'm on Google's Urkut :-P

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quoderat
I don't believe a chat room is what's next.

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octane
> flowing, multi-person, real-time conversations.

In other words, IRC? Every "next big thing" communication medium has been
trying to replicate the IRC experience for the past 15 years.

Twitter is the closest, it even has # and @ modifiers - I mean come on, this
is getting pretty ridiculous. A stand-alone twitter client that shows a
message from everyone that is posting to #topic and @messages directed to you?
Last time I checked, that's IRC.

Pretty soon all of us will get our childhood wish and everyone in the world
will be on IRC.

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paul
And blogging is basically just a .plan file...

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alphazero
Come on Paul. IM is hardly ancient geek history.

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paul
My point is not that they are the same, but that details matter a lot, and
that just because there are parallels between two things, it does not make
them the same thing. My .plan example was not made up -- that was an actual
criticism from the early days of blogging (according to Jason Shellen, who was
part of Blogger).

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alphazero
(Just read Jason's piece the other day, actually. You can't leave comments on
a .plan ...)

I agree that details matter a great deal. In any event, the comment
specifically questioned the temporal aspects of the analogy. Wishing you
success in your endeavors.

