The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by alphazero » Fri, May 01, 2009, 11:25 PM UTC

paul wrote: post #20

alphazero wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on Paul. IM is hardly ancient geek history.

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).

(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.

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

#22

Post by jaytee_clone » Fri, May 01, 2009, 11:37 PM UTC

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.

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

#23

Post by likpok » Sat, May 02, 2009, 1:38 AM UTC

lacker wrote: post #19

alphazero wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on Paul. IM is hardly ancient geek history.

IM and IRC are fundamentally different from twitter and friendfeed, because twitter and friendfeed have home pages with content. Deciding what goes on the home page is key functionality that wasn't in IM or IRC.

Some IM protocols allowed one to set up some info which is public and supposed to act as a bio. This content could be some form of HTML, which is more than anything twitter supports (i.e, it let you do the styling, much to the detriment of others).

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

#24

Post by mahmud » Sat, May 02, 2009, 2:15 AM UTC

marcellmars wrote: post #7

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

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

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

#25

Post by mahmud » Sat, May 02, 2009, 2:17 AM UTC

tumult wrote: post #18

galtenberg wrote: post #3

So when will Google officially make this their social network?

The Brazilians will just take it from us again :)

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

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

#26

Post by mrtron » Sat, May 02, 2009, 2:37 AM UTC

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…

If you like IRC, you will like Chatterous.

It is like IRC where you can get msgs by SMS/IM/email/etc

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

#27

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 02, 2009, 5:10 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#28

Post by lnorvig » Sat, May 02, 2009, 5:20 AM UTC

axod wrote: post #5

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…

"massive resurgence of real time chat this year" ... watch omegle. kind of ridiculous concept but usage is spreading virally.

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

#29

Post by octane » Sat, May 02, 2009, 7:05 AM UTC

mrtron wrote: post #26

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…

If you like IRC, you will like Chatterous. It is like IRC where you can get msgs by SMS/IM/email/etc

> It is like IRC where you can get msgs by SMS/IM/email/etc

So in other words it's not like IRC at all.

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

#30

Post by nostrademons » Sat, May 02, 2009, 7:08 AM UTC

paul wrote: post #12

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…

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

FWIW, the Amherst internal blogging/social-network site is called "planWorld", and it quite literally grew out of .plan files. Around 1999, someone decided it would be a good idea to have them be readable over the web, and so they hacked up a PHP app to expose people's .plans on a web interface. Eventually it grew the ability to post, to check who's been viewing your plan, to style things, to send private messages, and to have group conversations, but the terminology is still "finger" and "plan" and "whois".

Until recently, it was also possible to go the other way: you could finger jdtang05@note.amherst.edu and it would show you what I'd most recently posted through the web interface. But planWorld recently moved to a newer server which isn't running fingerd, so that functionality has disappeared.