From: Stephen D. Williams (sdw@lig.net)
Date: Wed Dec 27 2000 - 12:03:39 PST
Rohit Khare wrote:
>
> Five years ago, a lonely Rohit sitting at the office on Christmas Eve
> decided that it was too much trouble to be forwarding interesting bits
> to various folks by hand. 23,436 archived postings later, I can see
> that many assorted utensils beyond myself have grown in their own
> ways.
>
> Now, I can't say that five years later I have all that much better to
> do on a holiday evening than hang out on /dev/null twiddling sendmail
> config files.
>
> On the other hand, the "office" is considerably nicer, mainly by dint
> of it being my own, rather than MIT's. The downside, though, is that I
> used to work for a great guy and insightful mentor, Tim
> Berners-Lee. Now I work for this bumbling Indian egomaniac :-)
>
> Personally, I'd never have quite imagined I'd have succeeded with Adam
> in taking it as far as we have. We'll have a lot more to say next
> year, but for now, I'll note that it's been a month of being 26, and
> things are looking a hell of a lot brighter than they did at 25...
>
> For the last few days, I've been toying with shuting down FoRK. Today
> seems like an appropriate moment. I am about to be thrust forward upon
> a stage that no longer brooks long, brooding midnight posts. It's been
> years since the last VoIDpost, for example. And yet, however
> "successful" I might be so far, it's not nearly enough success to
> qualify for what Charles Ferguson so trenchantly termed "tenure in
> life". So I'll have to leave the soul-baring, frank-to-the-point-of-
> toasty, real-time software-CEO brain-dump thing to Dave Winer :-)
>
> It would, however, be the easy way out to merely shut FoRK off.
>
> Instead, I'd like it to transmogrify into a vast series of private
> subspaces reflecting the deconstruction of everyone's own FoRK. We're
> working on some new real-time information sharing systems that span
> buddy-list communities across email, IM, and the web. Blogging is too
> public; editing this page is too centralized. The day that system
> passes my sniff-test, it'll finally be a chance to see if "the dogs
> eat the dog food".
Check out http://www.gale.org. Similar ideas I think.
I've been toying with ideas related to some kind of mix of IM/mailing
lists/news/web logs.
The thing that bugs me most is slogging through too many linear lists of
messages that don't have the 'feel' that I assign to them internally. I have
been thinking for a while that there should be much better visual and
organizational ways to surf information flow, both dynamic and static. I have
some emerging ideas. Besides the Xerox spinoff's products (hyperbolic
hypertrees, colorized field lists) and some old stuff from UMD, I haven't seen
much that I like yet.
> So congratulations on another year without mailing-list software, XeNT!
>
> Happy Holidays,
> Rohit Khare
> CEO, KnowNow Inc.
> 2730 Sand Hill Road
> Suite 150
> Menlo Park, CA 94025
> (650) 561 0246 (direct)
> (206) 465 4936 (cell)
sdw
-- sdw@lig.net sdw@insta.com swilliams@Jabber.com Stephen D. Williams Insta, Inc./Jabber.Com, Inc./CCI http://sdw.st 43392 Wayside Cir,Ashburn,VA 20147-4622 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax Dec2000
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