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Talkitover is a new concept that for the first time unleashes the power of the Internet to support group discussion and collaboration.
Everyone can benefit from Talkitover: businesses wishing to keep in touch with their customers, friends pursuing discussion on their topics of choice, scientists collaborating on a paper, working groups engaged in one or more projects, company departments preparing an event, students collaborating on a report, families wishing to keep in touch... Anyone who knows anyone needs Talkitover!
Talkitover combines the best of Internet technologies: Email, mailing lists, newsgroups (Usenet), chat rooms, Web pages. Each of these technologies has strengths, which Talkitover retains, but also serious weakenesses, which Talkitover corrects. Here is how.
| Mailing list | Newsgroup
(Usenet) |
Chat rooms | Web pages | Talkitover | ||
| Immediate
transmission? |
Yes | Usually | Reasonable (but takes days or weeks if newsgroup is moderated) | Yes | No (not modifiable by others) | Yes |
| Can you start a new group? | Yes | Yes | No (requires lengthy process and vote) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Password protection available? | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Permanent record? | Recipient's responsibility | Maintainer's responsibility | A few days locally; longer record through services such as DejaNews | Usually no | Yes | Yes |
| Organized record showing threaded structure? | No | No (except if specifically provided by maintainer) | Yes | Usually no | N/A | Yes |
| Avoids unwanted information duplication? | No (many copies of shared information) | No | No (each site stores all subscribed newsgroups!) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Can you include links to your own material? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Usually yes | No | Yes |
| Can automatically subscribe and unsubscribe (to receive messages by e-mail or equivalent)? | No (sender must remember to send messages to you) | Usually yes , but may depend on list maintainer | No (except through special gateways) | Yes | No | Yes |
Email is immediate, it is informal, it can be sent to
many people at once.
There is no organized record!
If, like many people, you exchange email with many different correspondents, there is no easy way to piece together -- two days, two months or two years later -- the sequence of messages exchanged on a particular topic. Like looking for a needle in a haystack. And the situation is getting worse everyday, as more and more people discover the power of email.
Although excellent for one-time specific messages, e-mail
causes, for prolonged discussions, a tremendous waste of
effort and space: everyone systematically receives a copy
of everything. For some recipients this is good if they
want to keep the complete record; others may just want to
go and see the state of the discussion when they want to,
without flooding their mailboxes with a constant influx
of messages.
Talkitover retains the immediacy and convenience of email. In fact you can send Talkitover messages through email, and you can choose, by subscribing to a group, to receive by email all the messages of that group. But in all cases the Talkitover group page gives you, group by group, topic by topic and message by message, the archival support that is so woefully lacking from plain email.
Everything is kept organized; you can see who responded to whom and when. No administrative assistant would do as good a job. This record will be invaluable if at any later time you wish to retrieve the discussions.
This clear, organized, permanent is what makes Talkitover the tool of choice for all collaborative projects.
Mailing lists (or "Listservs" etc.) enable a message
to be circulated to a specified
set of people, who have "subscribed" to the group.
As with e-mail, there is no organized record. You can't go
to a Web page and see a clear picture of the thread of messages,
answers and counter-answers. It seems there are only two kinds
of mailing lists: those which go dormant after a while; and
those that drown their subscribers in an endless
flow of messages, without any organization,
As with e-mail, you receive a copy of every single
message, whether or not you are ready to deal with it.
In many cases you just want to be able to go and examine
the state of a discussion when you are ready for it.
Subscription and unsubscription are only as good as the
list maintainer. Sometimes they are done manually, in
which case you are dependent on the availability of the
maintainer;
other lists are managed automatically, but then trying
to unsubscribe can become a nightmare if you are subscribed
under one address and mail from another.
All that mailing lists offer, Talkitover groups also provide. You can subscribe to a Talkitover group, thereafter receiving all messages from the group. You can unsubscribe at any time. Subscription and unsubscription are automatic and immediate. When unsubscribing, you can specify any address.
It is in fact hard to see why anyone would still want to use an old-fashioned mailing-list in the age of Talkitover.
Chat rooms bring immediate interactivity to discussions
between many people, who may or may not know each other personally
in advance.
There is again no record, except if provided specifically
by the chat group maintainer. Chat groups are good for informal
interaction -- hence their success with teenagers -- but not
appropriate for long-term working discussions, which need a clear,
precise, automatically maintained history of interactions.
Talkitover retains the interactivity of chat groups, but makes the mechanism appropriate for long-term discussion and collaboration by maintaining a structured record of all topics and threads.
Newsgroups keep a good record of discussions on
a topic.
You have to fit in an existing newsgroup! Creating your own
Usenet group is a long, painful process. (People must vote to
approve your proposal!)
There is no privacy! Usenet groups are for all the world to see.
Sometimes that's what you want; but at other times you do
not want anyone else to know what you are talking about,
and with whom. No Usenet newsgroup will offer you such privacy.
Newgroups cause an incredibly wasteful duplication of information.
Every site stores a copy of every single message in every received
group! As a result, it has been estimated that 30% of all Internet
traffic is simply carrying newsgroups -- copies of the same information,
endlessly duplicated on hundreds of thousands of systems over the world.
The flow is so huge that most sites retain newsgroup messages
for only a few days -- forcing you to alternate between
news readers and web sites such as DejaNews.
Talkitover retains the clear organization and record of newsgroups. But with Talkitover you can create as many groups as you like, on any topic you like, to be discussed with anyone you like. And you can ensure the privacy of your discussions by not publishing the address of your group, or even by assigning a secret password to control access to your group's page.
If, on the other hand, you do want your group to be public, you can list it in the official Talkitover list of public groups, and make it as effective as a Usenet newsgroup.
Unlike newsgroup messages, Talkitover group messages are kept -- not discarded after a few days. And Talkitover doesn't use any disk space on your computer or the computers of your Internet provider.
Web pages are permanent (or as permanent as their owners wish
them to be).
A Web page can be seen by many people at once.
You access a Web page when you wish -- not when someone
interrupts your work through an e-mail message.
Using bookmarks (and links from your own Web pages)
you can keep a record of those Web pages which are of
most direct interest to you.
A Web page is under the control of its owner: you can't change
it! As such a Web page is not per se an appropriate vehicle
for discussion.
Although you can link to someone else's page from yours, you
can't force someone else to point to your own material,
however relevant and interesting.
All Talkitover groups are stored in Web pages. So you get the same benefits of convenient, immediate, universal access as with Web pages, and you can keep bookmarks and links to a group.
But because a Talkitover group page hosts a set of discussions, you can at any time extend it instantaneously with your own contributions. And in any message you post you can include references to any URLs you like, including your own pages. These references will appear in the stored record as HTML links that take readers directly to the source you have chosen.
