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.