[messaging] Displaying threads

[Michael Rogers]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On 29/04/14 09:49, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
> 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".

This is an intriguing idea. I feel like we ought to be able to
identify some features of the reply-to structure between messages and
the reply-to structure between authors that would allow us to find
distinct sub-conversations within a larger conversation. Something
like a hierarchical clustering algorithm...

Cheers,
Michael
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux)

iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJTYXPOAAoJEBEET9GfxSfMxykIAMCvudLe+1uZePF0IOheEIOb
UhE6uIwT+R0m6HRPxFGyBTxyvYnhOGcqt3Pv7hi5nzTMFM+6/ccDD3sqJhmIhWlC
j6zvqkuohNw+GxEhEvnUt/8HqJPZl5bR+mBGWwHx1aTfry/G6y1MJI17fqBgTtuo
bmlwF7l7OEPwwTLteOWa2TZ3H+IDTcZHD8e1nbxP1ORIhHv4WfRgfu8FhLVNsEM7
QDeBhk16QO10rT4b+Goxpj2jrKCWP3R72zIje2p81mcdiReDaoUS675TFqBNQc5y
tESyZFP6QYZ9gfBwMb06p79UpglBZKkrsWJHCxYVTLsdE2hOspC3PfZ+vaOduX4=
=yjoW
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----