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About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
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February 04, 2004
Gushing for Gush
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I got an interesting email: Hi Stowe,
I'm a regular "Get Real" reader, and I just wanted to let you know about our
product Gush (http://2entwine.com). I figured you'd be interested since it
integrates Instant Messaging (XMPP) with RSS news reading. We've also added
something called IM Blogging (Announcements). IM Blogging which has been going on for a while now in the form of AOL Away Messaging, but really hasn't matured enough because of limits in other IM clients. Anyway, please let me know if you have any questions, and I hope you find it interesting.
Regards,
Dudley Carr
My interest piqued, I took a look.
Example of Gush Sidechat
First Take
2Entwine's Gush is a really interesting fusion of several ideas:
- Replacing the sequential 'strokes' of IM text with 'sidechat' -- using two columns with the text from the IM participants displayed side-by-side.
- The blending of real-time communication -- IM -- with slow-time communication. But this is *not* an integration with conventional email; instead, Gush provides the notion of "conversations" -- a persistent , searchable, accessible log of your ongoing conversation with someone. The image above is a conversation I had with Dudley, yesterday.
Gush RSS Feed
Gush leverages the concepts of RSS in several ways:
- There is a more or less conventional RSS reader (see above)
- Announcements that Gush users post form a lightweight blog, searchable by friends or associates. The readership of these entries is based on user selected buddy list groups. These also serve as an 'away' message. (see below)
Gush Announcement
This combination of features is really a breakthrough. The unification of all my communications -- real-time, broadcast, and slow-time -- into a single app is very, very attractive.
One of the limitations of a gated community model like that of IM products like Gush is that there is no way to post content to the wide wide world. I hope that Gush is extended to support blog features like trackback -- then I can comment on external blogs from within the Gush 'announcements' model. Still, I think the notion of community-oriented postings -- within a workgroup or social group -- is well supported by the Gush model. Perhaps a tiny tweak to support posting announcements to external blogs or external users via email gateway would solve the closed world problem. Ditto the need for comments -- if I am using announcements as a mini-blog, then folks need to be able to mini-comment, too.
Anyway, I love it. I want everyone to switch over to Gush, so I can use it instead of the myriad other IM clients on my desktop. For the moment, Gush is free and the company will host your use. It has only been launched this week, and I don't know how many folks are signed up, but I predict a fast uptake.
Gush is built on top of the Jabber protocol. so you can communicate with other Jabber users. I asked Dudley about gateways to the public networks:
stoweboyd: No gateways to AIM, Yahoo, or MSN?
Dudley: No, and there is a good reason for that. We'd have to reduce some of the functionality if we want to interopt. Also the gateways are really unreliable.
Well... there are other reasons to consider interoperability. But for the moment, I will be eager to get others to use Gush, and drop their other clients. It's just cause I am so selfish. Please go download it. My address is 'stoweboyd@2entwine.net' -- ping me.
Comments (6)
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1. anon on February 4, 2004 01:18 PM writes...
Interesting. Well worth looking at.
Permalink to CommentWish also for interop, but we take what we can get.
2. blah on February 4, 2004 08:35 PM writes...
Lookings interesting.
"For the moment, Gush is free and the company will host your use"
Wow!!!! And how is this different from AIM, MSN, Yahoo? :-) :-) :-)
Permalink to Comment3. David Emberton on February 4, 2004 10:27 PM writes...
Man, as soon as they have a Mac OS X version, I'm SO there. I got to use this on a friend's PC the other day, and it gave me a real thrill. Like a mini-OS almost.
Permalink to Comment4. Dilip on February 6, 2004 05:08 PM writes...
wow, I do like the new chat view, but I have a RSS plugin for Trillian, so I'd couldn't sacrifice being able to combine all the chat clients into one app.
Permalink to CommentJust hope trillian folks look at gush for an interesting take.
5. garoo on February 11, 2004 02:36 PM writes...
Um, do you know that many Jabber servers (I use amessage.info) have gateways that allow you to chat with people on ICQ, AIM, MSN, etc?
I haven't seen anything in the Gush interface that would allow you to link your accounts to the gateways, but I did that a while ago when I first tested some Jabber clients, and Gush kept the settings when I launched it.
Permalink to Comment6. Stowe Boyd on February 12, 2004 08:30 AM writes...
2Entwine says that they don't want to deal with the 'lowest common denominator' style of interaction that would have to be used when connecting to public networks, but on the other hand, if users demand it they will probably have to cave.
Permalink to Comment