The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next | Hacker News Reader

The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next

readwriteweb.com

37 pointsedw51930 comments

The difference between IRC and everything else is the organization of it all.

It's hard to track and organize real-time conversations.. they start off in one place and end up in another. And then even if that's fine, it's impossible to then categorize the results in any meaningful way that makes it easy for others not a part of the original discussion to go back and view the details of the (large) conversation.

The nature of emails and other "turn-based communication systems" makes people tend to make each individual "element" of the thread a standalone entity. A single has way better odds of making sense on its own than a single IRC message...

They're very different forms of communication, suited to different uses. It's like telephone vs letter. Each has its place.

The idea of real time communication is similar to IRC, but remember that it's just a protocol. The big difference here is what you can do with how that data is presented to users.

There are some really neat things you can do with HTTP and a browser that IRC clients lack. The whole rendering a page with text, images, and markup together adds a lot to the experience that you just don't get with IRC. Great job friendfeed - it looks like this brings together the strengths of each.

mibbit's been experimenting a lot in this area directly. You should check it out.

Look at Adium (which is IM, but I don't think IRC) and Colloquy (IRC and SILC) on OSX. They output chat to XML which is then 'themed' with XSLT into HTML to display in a Webkit frame.

It sounds really convoluted, but it's presented in HTML form. and you can use images etc.

Of course, real time is a better form of communication.

But then, why don't we just stop using emails, just do video conference, or better yet face-to-face meetings?

Because there are other limiting factors. For example, no one has the time to have real-time conversation all the time. Real-time also limits the amount of people you can effectively communicate with.

That's why we have email/forum/tweet, because they serve different functionality.

Thus, real-time communication will never replace static communication as long as such intrinsic logistic limits exist.

push news:// & irc:// to the masses through jabber/json rendered in browser...

mibbit covers IRC, but you can clean up usenet now that google wont implement even the most rudimentary forms of spam blocking.

I still think the Friendfeed site does a poor job of getting across what it does and why it's useful. This readwriteweb article is better. They need some real-life examples, not just waffle about family and work groups. Can I use it instead of a blog, or is it as well as? If I can see the comments other friends are making elsewhere then do my comments on FF get pushed out to those things I'm on, e.g. twitter? That kind of thing needs to be covered, and without me watching a video or screencast.

The Man Who Made the Postcard Says "Telephonic Conversation" is What's Next

So when will Google officially make this their social network?

~9 months after Friendfeed raises a Series B? Maybe Google will drop the billion to buy both Friendfeed and Twitter so we can get Twitter with the superior Friendfeed interface.

The Brazilians will just take it from us again :)

I tell my chinese friends I'm on QQ (their local AIM/Y!IM conglomerate) and I tell my brazilian friends I'm on Google's Urkut :-P

He doesn't work at Google any more.

I don't believe a chat room is what's next.

> flowing, multi-person, real-time conversations.

In other words, IRC? Every "next big thing" communication medium has been trying to replicate the IRC experience for the past 15 years.

Twitter is the closest, it even has # and @ modifiers - I mean come on, this is getting pretty ridiculous. A stand-alone twitter client that shows a message from everyone that is posting to #topic and @messages directed to you? Last time I checked, that's IRC.

Pretty soon all of us will get our childhood wish and everyone in the world will be on IRC.

IRC? The next big thing? Who would have thought :/

>> "Last time I checked, that's IRC."

The difference is, IRC can scale really well. IRC has worked out how to deal with spam, abuse, botnets, etc etc. You can have moderated, password protected channels, user levels, kicks, bans etc etc. It'd take the 'social stream' thingys a while to replicate that functionality, and the question would be 'why rebuild it?'.

FWIW, I really do believe we'll see a massive resurgence of real time chat this year and next.

It's amazing to look back at just now big it was. Even the BBC ran an IRC server and had regular chats about programs etc. Then they shut everything down and moved to moderated message boards - which suck in terms of user experience. Since then people have had to try and emulate the experience places like twitter. which results in, again, a bad user experience.

We'll be back to live chat on the web soon enough though.

"massive resurgence of real time chat this year" ... watch omegle. kind of ridiculous concept but usage is spreading virally.

Have you used Friendfeed? It is what Twitter should be and it has the benefits of IRC with an order of magnitude more practicality.

Unfortunately I almost never use Friendfeed; all of my friends are on Facebook.

And blogging is basically just a .plan file...

Come on Paul. IM is hardly ancient geek history.

IM and IRC are fundamentally different from twitter and friendfeed, because twitter and friendfeed have home pages with content. Deciding what goes on the home page is key functionality that wasn't in IM or IRC.

Some IM protocols allowed one to set up some info which is public and supposed to act as a bio. This content could be some form of HTML, which is more than anything twitter supports (i.e, it let you do the styling, much to the detriment of others).

My point is not that they are the same, but that details matter a lot, and that just because there are parallels between two things, it does not make them the same thing. My .plan example was not made up -- that was an actual criticism from the early days of blogging (according to Jason Shellen, who was part of Blogger).

(Just read Jason's piece the other day, actually. You can't leave comments on a .plan ...)

I agree that details matter a great deal. In any event, the comment specifically questioned the temporal aspects of the analogy. Wishing you success in your endeavors.

FWIW, the Amherst internal blogging/social-network site is called "planWorld", and it quite literally grew out of .plan files. Around 1999, someone decided it would be a good idea to have them be readable over the web, and so they hacked up a PHP app to expose people's .plans on a web interface. Eventually it grew the ability to post, to check who's been viewing your plan, to style things, to send private messages, and to have group conversations, but the terminology is still "finger" and "plan" and "whois".

Until recently, it was also possible to go the other way: you could finger jdtang05@note.amherst.edu and it would show you what I'd most recently posted through the web interface. But planWorld recently moved to a newer server which isn't running fingerd, so that functionality has disappeared.

If you like IRC, you will like Chatterous.

It is like IRC where you can get msgs by SMS/IM/email/etc

> It is like IRC where you can get msgs by SMS/IM/email/etc

So in other words it's not like IRC at all.

No, IRC is fundamentally about the channel structure.

Additionally people have used an assortment of clients to receive messages including local apps, web based, etc.

It isn't about how you receive the message, its the structure of how people are organized to chat.

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