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

Re: Thoughts on messaging systems

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:11/22/1998; 5:50:59 AM
Topic:Testing a new feature.
Msg #:395 (In response to 394)
Prev/Next:394 / 396

This is a really good time to have a top-level discussion of features for our new system.

My opinion of the killer app in web-based info flow.. Two primary views. One view answers the question "What's New?" and the other view allows you to search all the accumulated information.

What gets thrown away in this iteration is the idea of navigating thru the hierarchy to find what you want. For a variety of reasons, and I can show this to you this on lots of other websites, it doesn't work. Websites run by groups of people want to be much more disorderly. The rules of hierarchy stand in the way of getting the stuff up on the web. And even worse, they stand in the way of readers finding what they came to find.

Another key idea is integration. The more each module knows about each other, the more high-level information is abstracted, the simpler the presentation can be to readers. And since all writers are readers too, improved findability means there's less duplication of work, and less paralysis coming from thinking that someone surely has already written about *that*.

The part of our strategy that isn't visible yet are the editorial tools for writers. Typing into this browser-based text box is awful. I have none of the usual tools for writing available to me. What's needed is a writing environment that's integrated with the web, not at a low level, not for *any* website, there needs to be a coupling, a set of assumptions about what a document looks like, who has access to it, and an algorithm for figuring out where it's stored, and that algorithm appearing to be very simple to the writers and readers.

Microsoft is doing this thru WebDAV and the Office products. Larry Ellison will use Java clients (he may have to wait a bit until they're competitive with the Office apps) and we're doing a zig to these zags, building heavily on our outliner, and our experience in the 80s with collaborative systems built on outliners (none of this stuff was published, but we did a lot of research, as did some of our users).

To a writer it will appear as if he's writing essays, articles, reports, stories, or participating in a discussion group like this one. The URLs are automatically generated. The software limits a lot of options that HTTP and file systems allow, thereby making it possible to hide these details. Writers can do what they do, and don't get immersed in the complexities of managing a website.

One of the features people ask for is to be able to watch certain flows without watching others. So, think of that as the third way to find things, but we don't expect people to remember those places or bookmark them. Look at the stories site for an example:

http://stories.userland.com/

When I point to one of these, the first thing it tells you is that it is a story and (because it's a link) you also find out that there are other piece like this one.

Same with http://changes.userland.com/ and many more of these virtual domains coming sooooon.

One thing that's nice about writing in a web browser is that people don't expect you to go back and edit the message. Of course that makes reading a bit more of a pain. I'm going to start doing some of the tweaks to the UI of the discussion board now. I'll see you back here in a few minutes with a report.

Dave

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