On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Keith Moore wrote:
I'm sure that in many users' minds a newsgroup is just another kind
of mailing list.
The conclusion seems fairly obvious...
perhaps to you. I can find two fairly obvious, but contradictory,
conclusions:
1. people are confused by the apparent similarity, so we'd serve people
better by trying to make the differences more apparent
2. people want to treat the two as identical, so we should try to make
them work as similarly as possible
My conclusion is number 2.
actually I don't believe that "users don't perceive much (any?) difference
between mail and news."
Well, I did say "many users" rather than "users". In the absence of any
hard data, I can't contradict you with facts, but I'm afraid I still
think many non-technical users will be of that mind.
Consider the totally non-computerate person (and there are still plenty
of those about). Somebody shows them how to turn on a pc and how to fire
up a browser and how to use it for email. I personally know several
people who do just that, and only that. (Well, maybe a bit of surfing as
well.) They may learn how to subscribe to mailing lists and that if they
do, the messages arrive in their inbox. Then somebody shows them how to
subscribe to a newsgroup - it's just like a mailing list except that the
messages don't fill up your inbox; they are kept in a kind of public
inbox. But you process them using the same UA in the same kind of way. I
think this is where the pressure is coming for MFT in mail to be "the
same as in news".
people figure out very quickly that there are differences in privacy,
style, and other social norms between the two media.
There are great difference in social norms between different mailing
lists and different newsgroups. I don't think the medium makes much
difference.
they may get annoyed when either system doesn't support the
functionality that they need - but this isn't an argument for making
the two systems the same.
What is the main argument for keeping them different? At the UA level,
of course. I don't mean under the hood. After all, we use the same
controls to drive a vehicle, whether it has a petrol (gasoline), diesel,
or hybrid electric engine. (Actually, I do seem to recall that in my
youth, you had to do something different to start and stop a diesel
engine, but that has long changed.)
Personally, I would love to have a keystroke in my MUA that did
reply-to-all for non-mailing list messages, and reply to some specified
list, if present, for mailing list messages. I would then train my
fingers to use it instead of the "reply-to-all and then think whether
you need to trim the recipients" that I currently use - often forgetting
the trimming bit.
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10(_at_)cus(_dot_)cam(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk Cambridge, England. Phone: +44
1223 334714.