Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next

readwriteweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 36 posts

Re: The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next

#4

Post by 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.

Re: The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next

#5

Post by axod »

octane wrote: post #4

> 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 t…

IRC? The next big thing? Who would have thought :/

>> "Last time I checked, that's IRC."

The difference is, IRC can scale really well. IRC has worked out how to deal with spam, abuse, botnets, etc etc. You can have moderated, password protected channels, user levels, kicks, bans etc etc. It'd take the 'social stream' thingys a while to replicate that functionality, and the question would be 'why rebuild it?'.

FWIW, I really do believe we'll see a massive resurgence of real time chat this year and next.

It's amazing to look back at just now big it was. Even the BBC ran an IRC server and had regular chats about programs etc. Then they shut everything down and moved to moderated message boards - which suck in terms of user experience. Since then people have had to try and emulate the experience places like twitter. which results in, again, a bad user experience.

We'll be back to live chat on the web soon enough though.

Re: The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next

#8

Post by rms »

octane wrote: post #4

> 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 t…

Have you used Friendfeed? It is what Twitter should be and it has the benefits of IRC with an order of magnitude more practicality.

Unfortunately I almost never use Friendfeed; all of my friends are on Facebook.

Re: The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next

#10

Post by 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.

Post reply on HN