Carl Tyler's Blog :: Threaded IM conversations

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Most of us know what a threaded discussion is, and Instant Messaging conversations with multiple people (N-chats) have never really followed that style. So a while ago I was thinking it might be good for a moderated N-Way chat to be able to have a threaded type method of conversations, effectively giving you a Domino discussion database in Real time.

So last night I went googling to see if anyone had done this already, and I came across this technical paper on the Microsoft Research site. It contains some interesting information about how people found threaded discussions in IM, and even an example UI. It definitely gives some food for thought, and I think when I have some time, so could be a few years

I might try and implement this in a custom N-Way chat. Would certainly make the flow conversations easier to read when archived for NASD and SEC regulatory compliance.

Now we all bitch about Microsoft and their interesting business techniques, but give them credit, there is a great deal of useful information up on the Microsoft Research site. I'd highly recommend people have a poke around up there as it's pretty interesting.

Comments

1 - As I read the M$ white paper I began to wonder why, if they wrote this is 2000 they aren't further ahead with advanced IM based services/interfaces. Then I thought about how we often think we are too far ahead of the market with the relatively simple collaborative interfaces we're dealing with today - As you said earlier, they're waiting till the market catches up and then they'll add these type of features. I'll bet that in three years they've probably got a fully functionaing system ready to go (of course with all the Windows hooks in it). Very interetsing - thanks for "googling" (isn't that a criketing term !!) us to it !!

N.

Posted by Neil Agate At 11:08:55 PM On 08/27/2003 | - Website - |

2 - To be fair the IBM research boys in Haifa have had a threaded discussion question/answer tool in beta form for sometime called Reachout. I thought it was brillant. However because it was a developed using the Sametime SDK and therefore based on Dominio no one in the larger IBM org was interested.

I guess if they has build it in Java they would of had more luck, it wouldn't have been half as functional or as stable but hey.....