On 07/17/2011 04:03 PM, Jonathan Wilson wrote:
> I decided to try it out, since most of the screen-shots I've seen seem
> to be contrary to that. So far, it looks like it uses the built in
> thunderbird threading, but just changes the message view to be more
> gmail like (see attached image).
Yes the normal threads are preserved up in the message list. But as you
can see, the conversation view itself is flat, and appears to progresses
linearly in chronological order. This works great for a back and forth
between two people. But it fails when dealing with a large thread with
many branches. Does that makes sense? Consider this thread, where the
number shows the chronology of the messages:
bob (1)
sue (3)
bob (5)
sue (9)
george (2)
bob (4)
sue (6)
bob (7)
george (8)
This kind of thread is very common on mailing lists, such as the python
mailing list. The latest posts are 8 and 9. As far as I can tell,
conversation view would probably show them this way:
bob(1)
george(2)
sue(3)
bob(4)
bob(5)
sue(6)
bob(7)
george(8)
sue(9)
See how the context of the messages is lost (unless you view the message
and see the quoted text)? That's what I am talking about when I say
that conversation view doesn't do threaded messages well. In regular
threaded mode, I can easily see what message follow from sue (whose line
of thinking I am most interested in), and can read those posts as they
appear on the list.
Google Wave had something similar to conversations, but they were
nested. It has always confused me as to why Google didn't implement the
nested view in their gmail conversations. I would dearly love to see
web forums get a more nested system too. Flat topics of hundreds of
posts is really hard to find things in and follow certain ideas.
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