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

[jducoeur]

Perhaps, but I have used many conversation systems, starting back in 1981, and I know what I hate.

And that's appreciated. But keep in mind, I've been doing the same for pretty much as long, with probably at least as broad a collection of systems. And I've been working on this project for a year now. So while I'm quite open to changes (indeed, I expect to do a lot of iterating over the design of the IM integration over the next three months), please remember that the design wasn't arrived at lightly. There are a lot of considerations that I'm balancing here.

No doubt, but that wasn't what I was suggesting. I was suggesting that you _allow_ the user to _choose_ a unique identifier. After all, they are the one with the best understanding of what will jog their brain into the proper context.

Fair enough; that isn't what I thought you were talking about. If you're suggesting essentially the same thing cellio did (the ability for a user to name this conversation for his own view), I think I've already been talked into giving that one a spin.

I would want to click on it (that is one of the conversation pieces) and get a menu of such options.

That would certainly be great (and is kinda-sorta what the long-term client will probably do), but remember that we're talking about interacting through bog-standard IM systems here. I don't even really have the full power of XMPP to work with, because most clients don't seem to leverage that power well.

Essentially, I have a single command-line environment to work with (maybe, but not necessarily, with HTML available) -- I'm going to make that as intuitive and useful as I can, but the options are highly constrained. So the only thing I can really do with clicking is a hyperlink to a web page. (Which already does the right thing -- it takes you to that conversation, so you can see the larger context.)

How long are conversation numbers maintained?

Initially, it's a simple LRU, so conversations age out once they die down. If the conversation comes back to life later, then it will change numbers, yes, but it's not related to login session like WoW -- this is server-maintained. (Indeed, login doesn't really have anything to do with this mechanism.) I'm open to making that smarter, and there are a bunch of things we might try out to do so, but I want to see how it works in practice first, before screwing with it.

Assuming I go with the user-assigned labels, those will age away similarly in the first version, but if it looks like folks are using the mechanism and liking it, I'll make them persistent. (Which isn't hard, but it's enough work that I want to make sure the tool is useful before I do it.) The slot numbers will still age away, but the labels will be permanent. (Modulo some complications of ambiguity.)

Which conversation information? Participants yes. Last comment? Last comment by the same speaker? Subject?

Initially just subject, but that's fairly arbitrary -- we can fiddle with that and see what information seems appropriate and useful. Adding any of the above is straightforward, if we decide it's useful.

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