Should Similar Worlds Implement Private Messaging Using the EP Model?
Poll - Total Votes: 18
Implement PM Like Experience Project Did
Implement PM Using Model More Like Traditional Email
You can only vote on one answer.
Please implement the new private messaging system so it simulates an extended private chatting interaction. This is exactly the approach that EP took with its email, and I will endeavor to explain why this is necessary.
When implementing an email system, you basically have these choices:
* Have each message become a self-standing document, where each reply becomes a new item in the person's inbox or sent items folder. This models the way most traditional email behaves in the real world.
* Have each message become a self-standing document, but create an illusion through the email system that all of the conversations in one thread are joined together. This is what Gmail does, among others. Long emails are "stacked" on top of each other. This is the best implementation when you expect each email to be lengthy and complex. It is not your case at Similar Worlds.
* Have all of the messages since the start of time in a person-to-person conversation joined together in a single large document. This simulates the appearance and feel of a chat program, where the prior conversations become the chat history. Every time you open up that file, you see a thread of all of your interactions, and typically in a place like Similar Worlds each of those interactions is short and to the point.
It is the last of these three methods that I want to see Similar Worlds implement and here are the reasons why:
1) It becomes very hard when you talk to so many people on a social network like this to keep track of your past conversations. Having a single place you can look for everything in your extended conversation becomes critical, and this is especially so when there are 50 email threads with 50 different users of the system. Having 50 conversations in your inbox is challenging enough. Having 5000 emails that represent the total traffic across 50 users is unusable.
2) People interact on these kinds of social networks differently than they do in email. People are not constructing long complex answers, usually. They want light, interactive, extended conversation.
3) When people are chatting in real-time, which is a very common use case you must consider here, they typically "cross" responses and send messages to each other *simultaneously*. A traditional email system totally fails in that interaction to capture the crossed responses. In the one-file-equals-one-user-to-user-conversation model I am advocating, both of the crossed responses appear in the thread. So you might lose the crossed response initially, but you can go back over the conversation and catch it on the second pass.
I think EP balanced these concerns pretty well and their implementation of email felt very conversational. It largely did away with the need for a separate chat function.
To contrast, one of your competitors "RelatetoThat" really bungled their email implementation. They tried to do a third-rate implementation of normal email, and there is no sense of conversation there. You reply to people and conversations fragment immediately. If you cross replies at the same moment, you lose the conversation and those crossed conversations get excluded from each other's email threads. There is no continuity of a single conversation.
This feature will make or break the entire website. No pressure there. :) I hope you make the right decisions.
When implementing an email system, you basically have these choices:
* Have each message become a self-standing document, where each reply becomes a new item in the person's inbox or sent items folder. This models the way most traditional email behaves in the real world.
* Have each message become a self-standing document, but create an illusion through the email system that all of the conversations in one thread are joined together. This is what Gmail does, among others. Long emails are "stacked" on top of each other. This is the best implementation when you expect each email to be lengthy and complex. It is not your case at Similar Worlds.
* Have all of the messages since the start of time in a person-to-person conversation joined together in a single large document. This simulates the appearance and feel of a chat program, where the prior conversations become the chat history. Every time you open up that file, you see a thread of all of your interactions, and typically in a place like Similar Worlds each of those interactions is short and to the point.
It is the last of these three methods that I want to see Similar Worlds implement and here are the reasons why:
1) It becomes very hard when you talk to so many people on a social network like this to keep track of your past conversations. Having a single place you can look for everything in your extended conversation becomes critical, and this is especially so when there are 50 email threads with 50 different users of the system. Having 50 conversations in your inbox is challenging enough. Having 5000 emails that represent the total traffic across 50 users is unusable.
2) People interact on these kinds of social networks differently than they do in email. People are not constructing long complex answers, usually. They want light, interactive, extended conversation.
3) When people are chatting in real-time, which is a very common use case you must consider here, they typically "cross" responses and send messages to each other *simultaneously*. A traditional email system totally fails in that interaction to capture the crossed responses. In the one-file-equals-one-user-to-user-conversation model I am advocating, both of the crossed responses appear in the thread. So you might lose the crossed response initially, but you can go back over the conversation and catch it on the second pass.
I think EP balanced these concerns pretty well and their implementation of email felt very conversational. It largely did away with the need for a separate chat function.
To contrast, one of your competitors "RelatetoThat" really bungled their email implementation. They tried to do a third-rate implementation of normal email, and there is no sense of conversation there. You reply to people and conversations fragment immediately. If you cross replies at the same moment, you lose the conversation and those crossed conversations get excluded from each other's email threads. There is no continuity of a single conversation.
This feature will make or break the entire website. No pressure there. :) I hope you make the right decisions.
