I've been thinking about the various chat systems I've used over the years, both good and bad, and trying to pick out the things I liked from them with the thought of creating something new. This is what I've come up with.
Essentially a hierarchy of “conferences” into which one can post messages.
You can view this hierarchy in a variety of ways:
I see the more savvy Net users mainly using the email option, and the newbies the web option but you would be able to use any combination depending on where you were and what access you had to the Net.
It would be authenticating, so only users with accounts would be able to access the postings, and there would be open, closed and hidden conferences.
Messages would be threaded (unlike facebook) and the system would include the ability to “ignore” a thread or sub-thread. Ignoring in Web terms would mean you wouldn't see postings, in email terms would mean you wouldn't receive any more emails on that thread.
You would be able to post photos and links and the server would organise thumbnails, link shortening for the email version etc.
So based on what we are doing now here's now examples.
We might have a conference called uk-riders which was owned by Jenny. It would be an open conference so anyone who had signed up to The Hug could join it.
When they joined uk-riders they would indicate how they intended to read it. If they had opted to mainly read it via the web interface then they could then read postings and make new ones that way. These postings might include photos which they would upload to the server.
If a thread was of particular interest to them (especially if they've posted to it) they could subscribe to the thread which would mean they would get an email alert when new postings were made.
If a thread, or sub-thread, wasn't of interest to them they could mark it to be ignored and they wouldn't see any further postings on the thread.
Alternatively they might choose to read the conference via email. In that case each new posting would come to them with a subject line prefixed by [hug][uk-riders].
They could reply via email and their email would become a posting on the thread. Any attached photo would be treated in the same way as uploading via the web interface.
Each email would include at the bottom of it links to mark the whole thread or this sub-thread to be ignored in which case they wouldn't get any any further emails from postings on the thread.
We might have a closed conference called misc owned by Paul where people chatted but it was only for friends. It would work exactly like uk-riders above except that before one was allowed to join it that would have to be cleared by Paul.
We might have a closed, confidential conference call “fridaynight” which was owned by Brian and Hugo. It would work like misc except that it wouldn't appear in the conference list and any attempt to join would be rejected without even acknowledging its existence so one could only join by Brian or Hugo adding the person to the conference.
Seem like a lot of trouble and they're abused, but do people want them?
I'm thinking of being brutal with quoting and simply suppressing it completely from the email interface. The clueless top post, the clueful have threaded mail clients, so why not strip out all quoted text? It's either that or only allow selected quoting and no top posting (which is harder to filter reliably).