A new means of communication

The New Media Consortium published this interesting paragraph in their article "The Internet Is the Place":

• "It is more difficult to grasp the potential implications of forms that are not modeled on a comfortable, twentieth-century mode of communication. One such example is Twitter: Twitter users post short messages that usually have to do with whatever is happening to them at the time—whether it is intellectual, practical, social, or professional in nature—to create an ongoing log of activity across a community at the minute-by-minute level. Twitter is controversial precisely because it does not have an elder analog; it is a cousin of instant messaging, but its broadcast nature marks it as a different type of communication. Twitter has been described as fun, trivial, innovative, addictive, a waste of time, and potentially a powerful social networking tool; but its implications for teaching, learning and creative expression, if any, are not yet fully understood."

latershare also is a kind of new communication type. It is a cousin of secret ballots, but it is not actually "secret" - since who posted what is finally visible to the group - and it has quite more use cases than that. It can be used without being at the same place, with asynchronous input and synchronous output. latershare is in a way a virtual ombudsman, a different kind of mail server, a content escrow broker.

In particular, we do not know yet how latershare will be ultimately used. There are many possibilities, but we'll see which will have a resounding success. I'm curious.