Be careful of the uncanny valley between "too slow" and "chit-chat". There's room in the world for "chit-chat": an online conversation that happens in real-tim

Be careful of the uncanny valley between "too slow" and "chit-chat". There's room in the world for "chit-chat": an online conversation that happens in real-time and consists of rapid exchanges of short sentences and sentence fragments. Google Chat, AIM, et cetera are fine for that. And there's successful media that involve exchanges of whole paragraphs, but not in real time. This is email, Stack Overflow, HN, et cetera. But, in my experience, there's not a lot of in-between. My own native medium is the paragraph. If I'm lucky I can, with effort, condense something insightful into a sentence. But often, in an IRC or AIM-style live chat, by the time I've finished typing that sentence the conversation has moved on. It just takes too long to compose. The antidote for that is to stick to short fragments, follow the rhythm of the conversation, don't say anything too tricky or controversial that will require a lot of exposition and framing, and defer longer-form discussion to a different medium, like the blog post or the email. In other words: If the medium is dynamic, "chit-chat" is the natural result. Most people just aren't good-enough typists or writers to conduct a rapid-fire real-time textual exchange of substantive sentences and paragraphs. If people could watch me compose HN posts in real-time I'd never post here again. It would be infuriating to watch me and even more infuriating to be watched: I type things that are clumsy or flat-out wrong, then I read them in horror, then I delete them. Welcome to writing. That's how it works, for most people. None of this is meant to discourage you from trying to build a hosted service for private-to-semi-public, limited-participation, limited-time threaded discussion. It's a thing I've wanted myself and have thought about building. But don't get so caught up in the glamour of real-time that you simply reinvent GChat or Skype or AIM. You may have a shiny new asynchronous real-time hammer, but it still isn't the right tool for driving a screw.