Om Malik reported today that Kevin ‘Digg’ Rose goes for 3rd startup:
We have learned from sources familiar with the company, that the trio are currently working on a new kind of a communications tool, that can be dubbed as an IM competitor.
Back in October 2005, Kevin Rose wrote in his personal blog an idea that he had for an instant messaging client:
14 yrs of instant messaging - why nothing new?
It dawned on me a couple hrs ago that I’ve been using instant messaging for close to 14 yrs now - and aside from video conferencing and file transfer, not much has changed. Here are some ideas I have for next-gen IM clients:
Social pools: Want to meet someone new? Set your IM account to ’swim’ and you will be placed into a ‘pool group’ of other users within x_degrees of separation. Join a chat room, or chat one-on-one.
Group/Individual Offline: The ability to right click on a group or individual and choose ‘appear offline’ – great for “sick days” from the office.
Tagging: Highlight any text within a conversation and tag it for later retrieval.
/tag keyword1, keyword2 from the IM window.Randomness at 1:00AM - some of this stuff may exist, I haven’t looked into it. If it does, send me the links
Time to crash.
Kevin
It is too early to tell if he still plans to implement these ideas for the instant messaging client, reports say that we will find out sometime later this month. Keep posted for more details.
Sounds interesting, but would you really want to be randomly connected to a pool of Diggers? I get enough randomness reading some of the comments on Digg itself without being chucked in a pool too.
db
[…] A 2005 blog post from Kevin (via Tech Manifesto) reveals some of his old ideas about IM, ideas this new startup might implement: - Social pools: Want to meet someone new? Set your IM account to ’swim’ and you will be placed into a ‘pool group’ of other users within x_degrees of separation. Join a chat room, or chat one-on-one. […]
[…] According to the article, the project will be some sort of communications tool, possibly set to compete with current IM services. For now the project is not public and very little in the way of details have been released, however it sounds promising. Tech Manifesto also recently discovered a 2005 blog post by Kevin Rose discussing IM technology. […]
Thursday Tech Buzz - May 10, 2007
Digg’s Founder Starting Another Company: Kevin Rose is working on a new IM tool (Twitter killer?) in his new company, he actually have talked about this idea back in 2005.
The pool idea seems great, I would love to meet new random ppl , would be great for networking
I hope thats not the only “feature” that suppose to makes it “next gen”.
I agree with the comments of meeting random people. Could be cool for kids who make up their stats and have multiple names to talk trash and run.
Personally, though I’ve met enough ant-social nutjobs online and really really do not want to run into more if i can help it.
As for the other features like selecting groups of people and being able to click offline. I would never have people from work on my IM ist anyways. You spend all day with them if their not friends I think I could find better uses for my time.. like not talking to them LOL.