[messaging] Displaying threads

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

On 29/04/14 09:24, Michael Rogers wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've never come across a good way to display threaded conversations on
> a small screen. Have you? Please share.
> 
> On a large screen, the best example I've come across is Reddit: clear
> nesting, plus a parent link in every message in case the nesting gets
> deep and the context isn't clear. But nesting is better suited to
> conversations with a high branching factor than conversations that go
> back and forth between a few participants. Do you know of any other
> good examples?

I don't have a complete answer, but I suspect some distinction should be
made about conversations that go off on their own tangents.

Imagine a message is sent, and a few people all reply to that message
"in parallel". These might all be in the same vein, and conversation
naturally continues from them all as a group.

Or one of them might be an interesting tangent that goes off on its own,
and if interleaved with the original conversation will just get
confusing. On a small screen, I'd hope that this case would somehow be
detected quickly, and that tangential thread disappear away (with a
little activity marker of some kind indicating where it forked off and
how busy it is, pulsing with each new message, and also being a
user-interface element that can be poked to switch to that thread).

As to how to distinguish a tangent on a particular point from discussion
continuing from a group of "parallel" replies? I'm not sure, but I think
the issue may be largely semantic - needing understanding of the text
being exchanged, or users doing something explicit or implicit to say
"This is in reply to this but not that".

> Cheers,
> Michael

ABS

-- 
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/attachments/20140429/c46e909e/attachment.sig>