Making Chat Easier
How can chat be made easier? But chat is easy, Jay, you say! No, not really. You see, if there are more than 5 active people in a chat room, things get messy. Really messy. Really quickly. Linear chat rooms have been around for two decades, and you can find them everywhere. People know them, love or hate, and know how to use them. So if we are to improve upon the idea of a linear chat room, we need to maintain simplicity, and alleviate the current complexities. Let's take five people actively chatting, maybe a message every 2 minutes, 30 messages an hour. If you have 5 people in a room doing this for 1 hour, you have roughly 150 messages.
But, see, people are not just posting their own ideas/thoughts/etc. People are talking with each other, responding to questions/thoughts/ideas/etc. This is where the mess is, because I may make a point, and receive 20 replies, but each are separated by 3 unrelated messages. So why not allow a message to be directly responded to? Think of Facebook's home page timeline, but in real-time chat. I say something, and then someone responses to what I say, and it is kept with my message. This makes following a conversation a lot easier, because it is all contained as a thread. And to make things even easier, why not allow each of these threads collapsable, so long threads (ones you may not be partaking in) are easily hidden.
With this, there are complications in that a reply message may be posted to a thread that exists outside the viewport (of the scrolling window), and you wouldn't see that the reply has been made. Also, when a reply is made to a collapsed thread, it would be hidden. These issues would need to be addressed with visual aids. Such as a number indicating the number of replies made to a message. Ultimately, though, I feel that this could allow intelligible chat to go on with more people over a longer people of time, without losing track of conversations, or making conversational chat hard in the first place.
