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?)