Group Messaging's Balancing Act: Design tradeoffs in small group social medium

The article does mention that the general model it advocates is that of classic Internet forums, and I think the difference is just a better User Interface.

This does not seem difficult: combine the thread list with the thread view so that looking at the messages in one thread does not bring you away from the thread list. That way, taking a look at the contents of different threads is not as disruptive.