by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
As I keep saying, unless I win the $1 billion Powerball, what I’m writing about here just isn’t going to happen. Not only does no one listen to me, but I can’t code and definitely don’t have any money. But this is an entertaining thought experiment, a way of letting off some steam in between novel copy writing sessions.
It has occured to me there is a crucial feature of the old Usenet that we just don’t have available anymore — inline editing. The last time I checked, with Reddit — which is the closest we have to Usenet these days — you can’t go into the main post and inline edit its text. You have to quote the copy in the comments below the main post.
Back in the day with Usenet, you had a full page to work with and within that full page you could have some pretty interesting discussions as various people inline edited the Post’s text. Think of it as a very primitive, public form of Google Doc’s collaboration feature.
So, this was an interesting way to add value to the conversation about something of interest, over and above the robust threading that Usenet had way back when. This is a feature that modern users simply do not have access to and if you gave it to them as part of a Twitter Killer based on updated, more modern Usenet UX concepts, they probably would love it.
But remember, Jack Dorsey is developing an open protocol for Twitter-like services that might upend everything. And, like I said, absolutely no one listens to me. So, lulz.
