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

Re: Thoughts on messaging systems

Author:Michael Winser
Posted:11/23/1998; 10:07:29 PM
Topic:Testing a new feature.
Msg #:427 (In response to 395)
Prev/Next:426 / 428

This is an interesting response. I think it hightlights the differences in how we use messaging systems as much as anything else.

My day is filled with email conversations. Some use specific distribution lists (known as aliases at Microsoft) and some are just a collection of people on the To and Cc line. The To and Cc headers become increasingly blurred as people use Reply All to respond in the thread.

I want to be able to create, use, read and manage threads (or discussions or whatever you want to call them) as a part of email. The kinds of things I want to do are:

- Add or remove someone to or from a thread. Today I do this by editing the To/Cc list but someone else on the thread can screw this up just by replying to an earlier message.

- Kill a thread. When a thread gets to be stupid or causing endless me toos on a huge distribution list, it should be possible for an administrator to kill of the thread. Subsequent attempts to reply simply fail. The infamous bedlam mail storm at Microsoft a while ago should have been preventable, even after it started.

- Publish some or all of a thread. After an interesting private discussion, it is often interesting to publish some or all of the thread for more widespread consumption. Sometimes this is to encourage further discussion, sometimes it is just a way of telling everyone how its gonna be.

- Attach information to a thread. This can be regular file attachments but it should also be arbitrary properties.

All of the above needs to work in a distributed environment (ie across multiple servers with mixed connectivity).

I certainly agree that using this browser based editing environment is less than ideal. However, the content editing environment has only a tiny relationship to the messaging system as a whole. As long as sufficient UI can be presented to control the messaging system, the client can pretty much do anything it wants for content editing.

Michael



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