Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

My kind of Broadband

Author:Peter Janick
Posted:3/6/1999; 7:46:34 PM
Topic:My kind of Broadband
Msg #:3747
Prev/Next:3746 / 3748

As I live in a community blessed with a great cable modem service, I have enjoyed the fruits of a "broadband" way of thinking. While the Mail to the Future/BroadBand effort is very sexy - it is more sizzle than substance - sort of like iMacs in different colors. Who cares what the background of the email looks like. It tends to obscure and trivialize the beauty and power of the plumbing underneath. Like Pointcast - its fun for the first few days but then you get sick of it and want the info fast and concise. Similarly the discussion group are cool for organization, threading, and collaboration. However the navigation is a disaster - ever try to read an entire thread including all branches - it is great going downstream but returning upstream is a real bitch.

The beauty of broadband is not to have a pretty background for the messages but to allow the user to download the entire discussion group thread with all its subthreads at once - even a long thread couldn't be more than 60 - 100 K - 5 - 10 seconds to download at most at ethernet speeds. Then a navigation method through the thread could allow you to instantly move from one part of the message to another up or down, right or left. Cable modems are fast once you get them going, but the latency - the time until you first start getting back information often isn't that much faster than standard modems so having to hit the server for each message is both tedious and time consuming.

Unfortunately in my experience most people (non computer professionals) are really terrified at using a computer and I've found it hard to get them to use anything but email for communication. I built an "extranet" for my company (11 physicians, 4 managers) and despite providing cool threaded discussion pages, people won't use them. I think this is why products such as Lotus notes are so popular. Once Frontier 6 is released my personal goal it to marry the email services of the content server to the message organization of the discussion groups and then serve up entire threads at a time over over HTTP with some wizzy way in the browser to navigate back and forth through the discussion threads. That's my kind of broadband nirvana.

Peter

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