Simultaneous Messaging.
Filed under: messaging
Well, since I am a complete geek, I love being able to IM my friends. The problem though is that I can’t ever seem to find the important stuff they say while instant messaging. Often my conversations get garbled up because we’ll be talking about something and go so fast that we are actually discussing more than one thing, and we reply, but not fast enough. It’s the trouble with living in constant fast forward. :D
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying SupraSphere is an Instant Messenger, *but* SS incorporates and improves on IM. How is this even possible?
Well, first, let’s travel back in time to 1996, the birth of the modern message board. Back in the day absolutely everyone used message boards, because they had and still have some really great features. Threads were started and then replied to. Even though everything was organized, conversations were not held in real time. The problem was that we’d reply, but never fast enough keep up with the constant stream of communication. The meaning of what we replied was then lost to a swarm of other comments.
Ah, remember the days of chat rooms? Chats took the form of IRC and web based rooms where it was *almost* instant messaging. Good luck trying to reply in a room of 10+ people, as inevitably an entire page-worth of nonsensical multi-colored words were thrown down in literally a few seconds.
Now we have GTalk, Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live, ICQ, and other instant messaging services. Mostly I use mine for a more social aspect, considering I really don’t think it’d be appropriate for a co-worker to see my awesome new icon of the day :P or to see what my status says. Certainly these clients have 
more useful aspects of them, including SMS messaging, file transfer, image sharing, and direct to email capabilities in some, but these are lost in the over-all “web toy” feel they give off.
SS improves on all three of these forms of communication, with something we like to call “terse messaging”, which is easy and intuitive to use, but somewhat difficult for me to explain. :) It’s reminiscent of a web forum given that it’s threaded. Terse also reminds me of instant messaging and IRC seeing as how it’s real time and can be addressed to more than one recipient, so the meaning of messages is not lost. It provides a much-needed way to communicate the same message to different people, while still allowing you to expound on other trains of thought with other recipients; it could be said that it is “chaordic“. Essentially, I’m saying that SS becomes like an extension of our brains! ;)
Posted on February 15th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
1 Comment
March 24th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
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