Poll: what number comes at the beginning?

[jducoeur]

One of the most important concepts in CommYou's new integration with IM is the notion of a "thread slot" -- the number that is assigned to a particular thread of conversation. Since you are potentially juggling several conversations in a single IM window, you need an easy way to refer to a specific one.

At the moment, I'm allowing ten slots at any given time (which seems about as many as you can keep track of anyway). These are, of course, numbered 0 - 9. One of the first points made yesterday (by laurion) is that that's pretty geeky. Every computer science student knows that the number line starts with zero, but most other people in the world thinks it starts with one.

I suspect he's right, and am leaning towards simply slicing slot 0 away, so you get threads 1 - 9. But before I go changing the code, I figure I may as well do a quick survey of opinion among my admittedly-unrepresentative friends:
[Poll #1228967]

Comments

[cellio]

I think some sort of label would be more meaningful than numbers, especially if there's a limited set. (So let's see: I'm participating in 9 conversations, I get bored with #s 4 and 7 and say "go away", then I want to join another, so it has to take over one of those slots, except that I spent hours mentally associating that number with something else entirely... ack.)

Subject lines are good for conversations but verbose for IM. But subject lines can be compressed -- one key word or an abbreviation -- at a little more pixel load but less cognitive load than numbers. In a later use case (I don't expect this in an early version), it would really rock if clients get to set that tag locally. 'Cause the conversation might be mainly about new features in Java 7, but I'm watching it because I just got a resume for a senior-guru position from one of the participants. Or it's about styling of 15th-century Italian balli, but I'm really just following the entangled thread about the class that Master So-And-So is going to teach on this at Pennsic. Conversations aren't about the same things to every participant, necessarily.

[jducoeur]

In a later use case (I don't expect this in an early version), it would really rock if clients get to set that tag locally.

Yeah, that's a story I'm contemplating -- essentially a command "Assign the label 'PennClass' to conversation 3 for me". I'm waiting to see whether it proves important in practice (we'll see over the next week or two), but it's on the list of serious possibilities. It's actually pretty easy to implement (probably just an hour or two for a first cut, maybe a day to do it well), so it's mostly a matter of whether and when it fights it way up the priority list, and what the command looks like...

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

I think that allowing human-assigned labels is likely to be important. I can't hold more than a couple numbers in my head and differentiate between them: very quickly, I think that it gets to the point where I constantly have to be reading back over the thread somehow to understand it.

I appreciate your earlier comment that this is easy from IM, but it's still something that could be avoided if I could have a tag that is more likely to trigger my memory attached.

(BTW, this page (http://commyou.com/) is a 403; might want to just force a redirect to the real site, as I thought I got the domain wrong...)

[jducoeur]

I think that allowing human-assigned labels is likely to be important.

Fair enough. Given that this is fairly easy to implement (at least well enough for test purposes -- making the labels persistent will be a little more work), I may push up the initial version to higher on the priority list, and we can see how it works in practice.

(BTW, this page is a 403; might want to just force a redirect to the real site, as I thought I got the domain wrong...)

Hmm. Good point -- I'll point that out to Aaron (my CIO). Thanks!

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

I actually signed up to the system to test out what we're dealing with here, and kept a couple notes on my first impressions; Would you like them? (They're on the computer I didn't bring to work, unfortunately, but I can pass them on tonight.)

[jducoeur]

Absolutely -- send them along when you get a chance...

[jducoeur]

(BTW, this page is a 403; might want to just force a redirect to the real site, as I thought I got the domain wrong...)

Okay, now working right. Not sure what happened, but I suspect it was a casualty when we did some DNS rearragement recently. Thanks for pointing it out...

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

I'm no expert on SEO, but one of the things I've been told is that having two URLs with the same content -- one at www., one at commyou.com -- can be troublesome for searchy bots.

I won't say that for sure, just something to put on the back of your mind. I've never put effort into caring about it, but I've never put any effort into SEO in general.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Useful to know, and as you say I'll stick it in the back of my mind; thanks. But for the moment, SEO is definitely a low priority. (And I suspect that we'll have totally revamped the website before it becomes one...)