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TFP 0000003
OPEN MESSAGING
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Members currently have the option of sending email messages and private messages to each other. A third option would also be highly desireable: OPEN MESSAGING.
Open Messages would appear in a members profile similar to the way our journals currently appear; most recent entry on top. Members should be able to make their Open Message boards public or private or limit the visibility to selected other members or maybe only to members on their buddy list.
Open Messages would not be "sent" like our private messages; they would be "posted" like our journal entries. So I could post a message to my own message board and any other member of TFP could also post to my board if I choose to make it completely public. A member could easily host a mutli-party chat by inviting members to post on his/her Message Board at the same time. If I am exchanging messages on my board with one buddy I could send a private message to another buddy inviting her/him to a multi-party chat.
Q. - What is the point of all this you ask?
Isn't this idea redundant with the capabilities we already have in our forums and our journal commenting ?
A. - Similar to the web cam proposal I think Open Messaging could bring a lot of people a lot closer together. I think most members will consider this to be a public way of chatting and most people will be very open and intimate in their chats the way they already are in the forums. Other people may choose to keep their Open Message boards semi-private and use them for a selected group of buddies to have private chats and exchange gossip.
As a TFP member I can currently peruse other member's journals if they choose to make them public and I can make comments here and there. Similarly with this idea I could peruse other member's Open Message boards and read the conversations they are having and post a message or even jump into an ongoing conversation if I stumble upon one. I have used this type of Open Message capability in another forum I belong to and I have found it to be exhilarating. I have participated in many epic multi-party chats and I have made tremendous long lasting, online frienships in this way.
There is alot more to this idea than I can possibley express here. If anyone is interested in seeing how this works I can send you an invitation to Orkut where hundreds of thousands of these Open Messages are posted by members from across the world. In Orkut they are called "scraps" and the member's Open Message boards are called "scrapbooks". Orkut also has thousands of forums and also has a private messaging capability. The problem with Orkut is that is left almost completely unmoderated by Google and it has become a wild and wooley environment. If we could do something similar to the "scrapbooks" in TFP with our mature members and our excellent moderation I think we could really take our forum project to a new level.
I invite your comments and ideas and hope that one or two people will take me up on my offer to invite them to experience this type of messaging.
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The sands of time past keep shifting according to how we remember or forget or refashion it in hindsight, which is no sight at all.
Kajal Basu
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