Intertwingling
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:date: 2005-05-21T16:58:00
:category: computer

Many Internet seers (e.g., `Nancy McGough`_) prophesied that the future
of messaging lies in intertwingling of all messaging platforms into one
stream of messages transported by different means.

I have thought about cross-posting a message to two groups at
`Gmane.org`_ and I had to think how is Followup-To: header translated
into email lists. I have no idea—it is probably dropped without
replacement. However, during that moment I could clearly see how
newsgroups are actually very much different from email lists (where I
spent most of my discussion so far). It seems to me that with good use
of Followup-To: header and cross-posting the thread is actually much
more independent from the newsgroup were it originated and being
off-topic is much more rude than in email lists, where because of
email’s inferior capabilities there is not much to do when the
discussion genuinely shifts to the topic which is not related to the
main topic of the list.

So when the intertwingling comes (and it is already coming) then only
the lowest common denominator will remain and everybody will get poorer.
Oh well.

.. _`Nancy McGough`:
    http://deflexion.com/messaging/
.. _`Gmane.org`:
    http://www.gmane.org