After my disparaging comments about Kuro5hin, below, I'm almost reluctant to put this up, but... Phil and I were musing on the ferry last night about directions of technology. It's clear that we're in a malaise like the early '90s, a big revolution has happened, incredible things have changed, and yet because we were so caught up in it we're now looking around saying "was that it?". In exploring this, one of the questions we asked was why telecommuting hadn't taken off yet. Both of us could probably do more work at home than we do, but little things keep us making a fairly long trek into the office each day.

So we started wondering how computers and the internet could facilitate the little interactions that make the shared space of the office necessary. Why is email not sufficient? And, since we think we're so good at this, why can't we seem to communicate effectively with some of our other branches?

I got into the internet back in the early '90s because I saw it as a better outgrowth of the social networking that was happening in FIDOnet. I think I use the net as a social tool pretty effectively. I've kept some pretty good friendships going despite moving thousands of miles away from the physical space that those relationships formed in, and I've developed some new friendships that have risen to the "sure you can crash on my couch" form that started with the net, a web page here, an email there.

Anybody interested in brainstorming for a proposal for a session at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003? We've got a couple of months, and I've got an office with a couple of eager folks who'd be guinea pigs for playing with conferencing software. Anyone got experiences with "tools for net collaboration", specifically oriented more toward occasional real-time interactions?