by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It’s occurred to me that there’s an awkward situation with the a hold over from the original Usenet UX that I’m basing this service on — how threads are represented within the service.
I think to properly update this concept, I’m going to have to think outside the box some. As such, I’m going to throw up the way it was done with Usenet — lines that represented each post in the thread or subthread.
Because of the existence of a Feed feature, I think what happens is you simply click on the subject of the Thread and you see the first post in the thread. Maybe on the right side of the screen you might be given some context as what’s going on with the Thread, maybe not. It could be that Threads would represented much like Posts on a Blog. This really simplifies things and also makes it easer to slip in a full page ad that fits whatever the thread is about.
Subreads would be represented as a link somewhere around a Post that would let you to get even more specific about whatever is being discussed — which, in turn, would allow for even more specific ads. This is a very potent advertising opportunity, all things considered because you could sell ads about things that are directly related to whatever heated discussion was going on within the Thread.
And, remember, each individual Post would be collaboratively in-lined edited like a Google Doc. A new Post in the Thread or Subthread would be spawned….maybe when x number of people have edited a specific Post? (There are only so many different colors you could use to distinguish between different Authors.)
The point of this would to reduce the overall number of Posts within a Thread to keep things both manageable and scalable. And I still like the idea the idea that a content provider could push pre-formatted content directly into the service that would look like whatever Website it was coming from. (You might have to figure out a way to convince them these content providers to allow in-line editing of their content, even though it would look like people were editing a Webpage from, say, The New York Times.)
While we’re talking about that, the ability to push pre-formatted content from an established Website would really help Users and content providers alike. Users would be able to see the whole story without being blocked by a paywall and content providers would be able to sell ads on the content pushed into the service — with my hypothetical Twitter Killer getting a cut, of course.
Anyway, I wish I had the money — or skill — to make this proposed service a reality. I guess I can keep dreaming about winning the PowerBall, huh. But this particular daydream is really interesting to explore and think up different problems to solve. It’s very relaxing.
