"Overhear," which is NOT Twitter.

OverHear

I'm going to try explaining something ("Overhear") again, that I have tried to explain many times before. People very rarely see it.

Caveats

As you read this, though, -- if you catch yourself saying, "This is IRC," or, "This is Twitter," -- read again. It is neither IRC nor Twitter, but it subsumes them both.

I came up with this before Twitter ever existed, and have documentation on record.

Introduction

Overhear is software so that people can overhear each other's conversations.

The user interface is much like your typical IM client, except that you overhear your friends' conversations in a non-obtrusive way, AS they are having them.

An Example

So for example, if my friends Joel and Marcus are having a conversation, then a little speech bubble pops out from Joel's name, saying, "Hey Marc; Have a moment?"

And then when Marcus replies, "Yeah, sure, what's up?", I see that in a speech bubble, as well.

(Hold your privacy concerns, we can address those.)

And then, while my two friends Jabber away, their back and forth continues to be present, albeit in an abbreviated, tiny form, unobtrusively, and never stealing the focus (the user interface concept of "focus," regarding where keyboard input is directed.)

Now, if I want to, I can click on their speech bubbles, and the whole conversation between them unfurls, and I can read the whole log. Further, they notice that someone is reviewing: They can see the "shadow observer."

Then I can "knock" on the conversation, and they can "open the door" if they like. (Or, because we're all friends, the door may not have been left closed in the first place.) Then all three of us are talking.

And guess what? Now my friends are also overhearing _me_ in this conversation. They might not know Joel or Marcus, but they know me, so they'll at least see my fragments of conversation. And who knows? They may review the conversational log, and knock to come in, then meeting my other friends.

This is the basic outline of "Overhear."

This isn't IRC

People have told me many times, "This is IRC. Your conversations are rooms."

This is not at all like IRC. In IRC, people have to agree on the address on a chat room. In this, "rooms" are things that spontaneously appear wherever two people decide to hold conversation, -- similar to how it works in IM.

This isn't Twitter

The easiest way to see this, is to compare your Twitter log, with an IM log.

Notice how different they are?

Do you _ever_ seen anyone in Twitter say, "Hey, John, have a moment?"

Do you ever see rapid back-and-forth?

(Actually, I *have* seen that before, but I quickly delisted both people: They were cluttering up the display.)

Twitter's not like IM-ing; It's more like Micro-Blogging. And each Tweet is like a Unit of Labor, served from a great Pez Dispensor of Labor. This is a trait that it shares in common with E-mail: The sense of labor.

"But they're all messages; What's the difference?" The difference is the user interface. And both the user interface for Email, and the user interface for Twitter, have the "Pez Dispensor of Labor" effect.

But IM conversations are not like that, and the user interface is not like that.

In OverHear, conversations between your friends are in the ephemeral space.

No doubt, people will figure out ways of logging all the traffic, and people will pore over the traffic to ask, "Did I miss anything really important?" There is much more to say about such things -- We are quickly working our way to a world that centers around what I call, "The Tapestry." But that is a separate discussion for another day.

Just understand that Overhear differs from Twitter, in that conversations are truly conversations (rather than microblogs that address one another,) and understand that the UI is not a pez dispensor of labor.

In the case of communications software, UI is not "frills;" UI *is* the thing itself. IRC could be conducted over SMTP, and e-mail could be conducted over IRC protocols. The back-end implementation is important for efficiency reasons, but as for understanding the workings of the thing as a communications device, the focus is ALL on the User Interface.

Privacy

"Wait, I don't want everyone to see every personal conversation."

Yes, yes, of course. So, privacy switches, privacy policies, and so on.

We do not worry about FBI spies at the Easter family party; People are quite happy to share their conversations with others. There are strategies for maintaining privacy, if that is what is important to you (and it is important to most people.)

Look at how Facebook works, if you need a model.

That said, don't look too closely at Facebook -- it angers me that I cannot make my profile globally visible on Facebook.

Summary & Conclusions

Conversations can be transparent.

We can make online communications resemble the Easter party, or a gathering of you and 20 of your friends, where you can overhear, slip in, and slip out of conversations.

The Internet is a great conversational space. There is still great distance to cover.