I remember doing a research paper analyzing instant messaging for my anthropology class in college. I love anthropology; just being able to study life in a way I never considered. Then when I became a graphic designer, I acquired skills to synthesize solutions. If you ever become a designer (not just a graphic designer), taking anthropology courses is probably one of the best decisions you'll ever make. It is probably a foundation for interaction design, a whole new field of study which looks at how we interact with our environment, and as an interaction designer you would be helping others connect with their world in a more richer and engaging experience.

So I had a little chit chat with my cousin about group chats for instant messaging the other day and we complained about the messiness of group chats when people start going off on tangents and you have to somehow follow multiple conversations or look for your own conversation in a pile of other conversations. That has always been the dynamic nature of conversation. Unless you moderate the room, you can never really get people to "stay on point". But why lock the discussion down to just one theme/topic? Chat rooms are and will always be organic. What is needed is a way to leverage the simplicity of the one-to-one conversation in a chat room environment.

Let's take a simple problem, and this sometimes happen when I converse with friends, is when two conversations starts to exist in parallel (even though it is only two people!), and they alternate each other. It happens because something new gets introduced before the other person has had a chance to respond.

A: Did you see the new movie Up?
B: Yeah, hold up, my mom's calling.
A: Oh okay. What's going on?
B: I haven't seen Up yet.
B: Mom was just asking if I ate dinner yet.
A: You wanna go see it tonight?
B: She's going to be out so I gotta fed myself.
A: Where is she going?
B: Sure let's go see Up.
A: Yeah, let me go buy tickets for 9:00pm.
B: She's on a date.

Well, you can kinda sense that there are always two topics on the table. In a one-on-one conversation, this is normal, and not so big of a problem. The problem is when you go into chat rooms, and 4 or 5 topics are running concurrently. If it were me, I would consider the possibility of being able to visually drag my own conversational thread into a new space (or press tab twice to indent into a new area).

Another way to keep conversations more orderly is the ability to insert media objects such as a YouTube link will automatically be clickable into a video frame for playback. But another media object I would like to see is the Text Block. Sometimes my friend copies and entire web page or email, and once she pastes it in my chat window, I can't see our previous comments without having to scroll all the way past the entire copied text. The Text Block is merely a neat way of showing a huge piece of text, but it should be able to collapse into a preview of the first few lines of text like Gmail's email preview when you look at your inbox.

I suppose these wishlists aren't new. But I like Google spearheading an effort to change the way we communicate with their Google Wave development.