Intertwingling

So 21 května 2005

Many Internet seers (e.g., Nancy McGough) prophesied that the future of messaging lies in intertwingling of all messaging platforms into one stream of messages transported by different means.

I have thought about cross-posting a message to two groups at Gmane.org and I had to think how is Followup-To: header translated into email lists. I have no idea—it is probably dropped without replacement. However, during that moment I could clearly see how newsgroups are actually very much different from email lists (where I spent most of my discussion so far). It seems to me that with good use of Followup-To: header and cross-posting the thread is actually much more independent from the newsgroup were it originated and being off-topic is much more rude than in email lists, where because of email’s inferior capabilities there is not much to do when the discussion genuinely shifts to the topic which is not related to the main topic of the list.

So when the intertwingling comes (and it is already coming) then only the lowest common denominator will remain and everybody will get poorer. Oh well.

Category: computer Tagged: Intertwingling