Wednesday, April 03, 2002
Okay. Where's the IM part to this? I'm subscribed to a couple of different outlines. Potentially, they could subscribe to mine. If I see something of interest in one of their "outlines," I simply copy and paste it into mine?
For example, from Dave Winer's response to Bill Seitz (also available at Scripting News), is copied and pasted as follows:
My personal opinion -- the reason he hasn't seen the type of system he describes is that it isn't implementable.
Or put another way, you have do what we're doing before you figure out how to do what he wants.
We start with the Instant Messaging model, which many people understand. But you get a structured surface to write on.
Hrm. Now that text is in at least two different places.
In terms of giving a sense of permanence to text, and/or context for discussions, I don't see too much benefit (yet) of using this over something like, say, a simple message board.
Because, as far as I can tell, there's still not much interaction going on here. I write to my outline. Maybe somebody else reads my outline, or maybe I check out what somebody else (let's say Buddy X) has written. If I write something about there something, Buddy X needs to check my outline for that response (assuming she's subscribed to it, of course).
But maybe Buddy Y also wrote something worthwhile, and also noticed my outline has updated. He then peruses my outline, but finds nothing there that relates to what he'd written. So then what? Does Buddy Y fire off an e-mail, or an instant message to me to check his outline?
Still noodling, still trying to crack this collaboration puzzle.
Copyright 2002 © Robert K. Brown
