Thanks for agreeing to do it this way, Steve. It seems appropriate.

First off, then: how long has Quicktopic been running?

Edited by author 02-10-2003 01:05 PM
Great to be here, Giles :-)

QuickTopic launched as Take It Offline in October 1999. The original idea was like this:

You're participating in a mailing list (or just plain group email), and the discussion goes off-topic as it inevitably does in a long-running forum. So you want a place to start a little side conversation and invite those who are interested.

To work in this context, Take It Offline had to be extremely easy to start up and use, or people wouldn't go there. There's always strong intertia against going to any other locale in the middle of a conversation (this happens with email too).

But I found to my delight that people were attracted simply to the ease of use and started using TIO for all kinds of things, including longer-running topics. So I renamed it QuickTopic and gradually added features to accomodate the uses I saw, and QuickTopic evolved.

>But I found to my delight that people were attracted simply to
>the ease of use and started using it for all kinds of things,

What kinds of things?

Edited by author 02-11-2003 08:04 PM
Back then Keith Dawson used it immediately in his TBTF email newsletter, using linked forums to add selective interactiveness. RageBoy picked up on this and spawned a wild surreal thread in an EGR issue.

Teachers use it for all kinds of class discussions -- whole school systems have adopted it for class critiques of individual work, book discussions, WebQuests and so on. They're incredibly innovative, and I get a huge kick out of the educational uses.

People started using it as a bulletin board for their sites, inspiring features that support very long-running topics. There are thousands of these now. Maybe the longest one is Gary Stock's GoogleWhacking forum, with over 20,000 posts.

Jon Udell inspired Quick Doc Review with his innovative use for document commentary. I was so jazzed by that! I talked to him about it and immediately got working to make it a major feature, which is now used heavily in education, and in peer review of medical practice guidelines.

Magazines use it to selectively do article commentary, CIO magazine being a big one.

Blog usage is growing (boingboing.net being the most prominent) because bloggers like the email features. The bookmarklet makes it pretty easy.

Maybe the most impressive to me recently is the one featured at the top of the Buzz page now, resulting in that wondrous 3rd-person comment by Robert.

I'd better stop -- I obviously get excited about the creativity that people apply. For me that compounds the satisfaction, because it's really a group effort; I get to work with feedback and the best uses I see, and QuickTopic evolves in ways I couldn't have anticipated.

For that reason, I'm a big fan of open interfaces and standards, like the XML-RPC/SOAP interface for QuickTopic and its RSS capability. I'd like to see more people do cool stuff with those.

And of course I think there's a huge potential for business usage, especially given enhanced security or inhouse-installed software (already at three companies).

How many Quicktopics have been started? How many are active (if you measure that?)

There have been about 230,000 topics started since the start, including Doc Reviews. They're still available to their readers.

In any given week, there are about 1000 topics being written to, with about 10,000 unique visitors a day.

The growth has been entirely by word of mouth. I wish I had more time and resources to spread the word, because people still tell me they "stumbled upon" QuickTopic.

Have you seen it used for things you might not have originally designed it for? It's essentially an instant web page - have you found people using them to publish their own writings, for example?

How about Quicktopics used for purposes other than discussion? Have you seen any used for things like a note-to-self keeper, or a to-do list? Has anyone posted poetry or ASCII art?

Edited by author 02-13-2003 09:53 AM
I mostly see only topic titles unless people direct me to topics or there's a problem, but judging by titles alone, I've seen what look like to-do lists, posting and critique of poetry and prose (especially in schools, judging by the .k12 and .edu email addresses), role playing games, job posting boards, discussion boards for city governments, restaurant and club reviews, job candidate reviews... I've forgotten more than I remember.

I use it of course for all my design notes.

People use Doc Review in innovative ways too. For example, someone I know has discussion points that need to be answered each time a certain process happens -- sort of a linear workflow problem. So for each instance of the process, they upload the same template document. As a quick checklist, they just look for the 'glasses' icon, and can see details using the Comment Review page.
Another recent fun one: at David Weinberger's suggestion I grabbed a transcript of Bush's State of the Union address and uploaded it for review.

One new feature that'll make for even easier branching from email will open up lots more possibilities. I think I'll announce it soon, when I release QuickTopic Pro.

So is it fair to say Quicktopic is a lot more than instant discussion? From those examples, it would seem to also be a kind of instant groupware, or instant publishing, even a kind of instant blogging in its own right (rather than just a comment system for blogs).

What's the model going to be for Quicktopic Pro?

I like the phrase 'instant collaboration', which encompasses all the uses of QuickTopic forums and Quick Doc Review.

QuickTopic Pro will add four initial features prioritized by people's response to a survey I did a few weeks ago
(http://www.quicktopic.com/cgi-bin/vote_new...gi?mode=show_scores), tempered by ease of implementation for me. More of these features will follow, all geared towards making life better for topic creators who manage long-running topics. There'll be an annual or monthly fee. There's also a new feature coming that makes it really easy to move a conversation from email to QuickTopic -- 'revolutionary' might be too strong a word, but I think it can change the way people work. I'm really excited about that, and I may announce it along with the release of QuickTopic Pro.

There's also a QuickTopic Enterprise Edition coming, available as a hosted service or for in-house installation, which adds extra features like by-invitation-only topics and more extensive logging. I think that QT in the enterprise, used for all the significant group conversation that's normally done via email, can be the basis for knowledge sharing that's almost impossible with email. Imagine being able to take any group email conversation easily to QT, then being able to search those conversations with any stock inhouse search engine. I actually think this has even bigger potential for corporate knowledge sharing than enterprise weblogging.
My best hope is that these will enable me to take QuickTopic from a part-time pursuit (it's just me) to full-time and even hiring some people. My biggest kick, though, is having thousands of people using it usefully every day. Of course I'd like it to be millions of people.

> There's also a new feature coming that makes it really easy
>to move a conversation from email to QuickTopic --
>'revolutionary' might be too strong a word, but I think it can
>change the way people work. I'm really excited about that, and I
>may announce it along with the release of QuickTopic Pro.

Just for clarity's sake - will that new feature be only available in Pro, or is that something we can expect on the existing Quicktopic service?


>I actually
>think this has even bigger potential for corporate knowledge
>sharing than enterprise weblogging.

Now that's interesting. As someone who once tried (and failed) to get a team of people in a corporate environment to share knowledge via a mailing list, I know how hard it can be to foster collaboration in a workplace, especially electronic collaboration.

There's been a lot of talk about the use of weblogs for knowledge management (so-called "k-logs"), and no doubt the idea may well catch on. Personally, I think the larger the organisation, the harder it will be to implement such a policy.

But to return to your point - what's going to be the biggest hurdle to overcome on the path to getting people to make use of a
Quicktopic-style tool in the workplace? Is it your job, as the
creator of the software (and presumably of the UI) to make simplicity the key to encouraging participation, or is it the job of the company that decides to implement it?

> > There's also a new feature coming that makes it really easy
> >to move a conversation from email to QuickTopic --
> >'revolutionary' might be too strong a word, but I think it can
> >change the way people work. I'm really excited about that, and
> I
> >may announce it along with the release of QuickTopic Pro.
>
> Just for clarity's sake - will that new feature be only
> available in Pro, or is that something we can expect on the
> existing Quicktopic service?

These new features are for QT Pro. That doesn't mean I've stopped working on the free service. But I'll be able to spend more time on all of it if it's paying a few more bills :-)

>
> Now that's interesting. As someone who once tried (and failed)
> to get a team of people in a corporate environment to share
> knowledge via a mailing list, I know how hard it can be to
> foster collaboration in a workplace, especially electronic
> collaboration.

Me too. It always falls naturally back to email. That's why it's important to work in email (like I'm doing right now). And it has to be a tiny step to upgrade a 'native' email conversation to QuickTopic, and it has to cause no interruption in the email flow. People don't want to go somewhere else to collaborate -- the group inertia is extremely strong.

>
> But to return to your point - what's going to be the biggest
> hurdle to overcome on the path to getting people to make use of
> a Quicktopic-style tool in the workplace?

I think the biggest barrier is the social inertia I mentioned above.
> Is it your job, as the
> creator of the software (and presumably of the UI) to make
> simplicity the key to encouraging participation, or is it the
> job of the company that decides to implement it?

It's entirely my job, and it's got to be simplicity combined with a compelling advantage over plain email. Company policy can't -- and shouldn't try to -- enforce social behavior patterns. And collaboration is, above all, a social activity (so it can actually be fun!) So the collaboration technology has to be transparent, with no learning curve, and it needs to make things easier for everyone. It needs to supply its own motivation. When the technology can add benefits beyond keeping your inbox organized (like being able to unsubscribe from a big conversation, or bring someone in late, or have a central thread instance to point to, or search archived conversations), you've got something that'll stick.

Edited by author 03-03-2003 08:49 AM
I should clarify better regarding the new email-to-QT feature: I'm thinking of making it available free for short conversations, so people can try it, but I want to make it a fee-based service. I haven't decided yet whether to make it part of QT Pro.

[One last thing I should do is link back to the Write the Web introduction to this interview: http://writetheweb.com/Members/gilest/steveyost]