Technorama

I'll start by defining my terms, a Conversation is communication between two or more people over an standard network protocol. Typical conversation protocols are email (SMTP) and Instant Message (Jabber).

The crux of this post is that unfortunately there has been a wave of replacing these established Conversation protocols with a "Forum". Where a forum is a web-based conversation system which does not interact with existing Conversation software like Outlook or Thunderbird etc.

Forums use a custom format per implementation, and store their Conversation records in a centralised location in a custom format incompatible with other Conversation systems or even other Forums. This change has been a shame, because we have lost the flexibility we had. And don't forget, people can browse email conversations online in a web-browser in just the same way that a Forum can be browsed.

One thing that would be handy is if when we join a discussion mailing list, we could also search the archive of the mailing list direct from our conversation software.

In the meantime, I'm going to save my time, and stick to email mailing lists

Labels: email