There's more at stake than 2-way unfettered interop among various collaborative tools. I've done a boatload of that over the years. Have done NNTP to Web, email to Web, all the combinations. Making Groove a peer of these others is not, in itself, interesting to me, or a solution to anything.
To me the problem to solve is: can the different strengths of these different modes complement one another?
Strengths of Groove:
- context assembly (all the parts kept together)
- well-defined groups
- private/secure
- space is truly shared, interaction is direct
Drawbacks of Groove:
- don't always need all the parts here on my disk, the web's approach (pointers) is often easier/better
- don't always need well-defined groups, the web's fluidity and loose affiliation can be easier/better
- don't always need private/secure, can work against the "horizon of observability" effect
- don't always need shared-space direct interaction, weblogs that federate but are individually controlled are a different and useful model
Strengths of Weblogs:
- pretty much the inverse of above
Drawbacks of Weblogs:
- pretty much the inverse of above
I think the first thing to solve is for everybody to get clear that both of these modes are valid, and to understand in which circumstances to use one or the other, and how (and why) to transition between them.
Jeroen's public link to this space is essentially the QuickTopic (http://www.quicktopic.com/) (formerly TakeItOffline) strategy. A simple, natural way to connect the two worlds. What we are doing here is more informal and immediate than if we were writing for our weblogs -- "for publication" so to speak. And yet, Jeroen has extended the horizon of observability by pointing to the space. If collaboration here needed to "Take It Offline" still further, a subgroup could decide to move into another space into which the public would not be invited.
I think, basically, that more people need to experience these modes and transitions, using the existing/available tools, before anybody goes too far down the road of building anything. And hopefully by the time there is more awareness on both sides -- bloggers of Groove, Groovers of blogs -- things like edge services will allow rapid and iterative development of whatever glue is needed, in a bootstrapping mode that can be used, and reacted to, in an immediate and interactive way.
