By Mark Morgan
The official description of Conversant is fun to read. I ran it through the Street Tech BS Detector and scored "Waist Deep". Clearly the guy who wrote that should have done a better job. Isn't there a short, easy description of Conversant?
Here we go:
Conversant is set of tools that are used to build programs that lets groups of people work together over the Internet.
Let's break that down
A set of tools
The jargon for this is
development platform. Two perfectly harmless words, meaningful, easily understood--stuck together and made completely content-free. Conversant is programmed in UserLand UserTalk, and it runs in Userland Frontier or Radio UserLand. Why do you need to know this? Because anybody who can program in Usertalk can program for Conversant. Conversant is the software the runs Conversant-powered applications. There are several more parts to a Conversant installation, but that's not important to most of us. What's important to most of us is that people can program things to run in Conversant. Rumor has it that soon enough you and I will be able to ask people other than Macrobyte to build things in Conversant and they'll be able to do just that. For those keeping a jargon watch, Conversant is going to be available soon as a
developer release.
C'mon, we all love new terms to impress our friends with, don't we?
To Build Programs
The hardest damn part of explaining "What is Conversant" is that the thing is practically an online operating system. Remember from way up there a paragraph ago, Conversant is a set of tools that people can program to do things. The current (5/6/2002) public release of Conversant, that what you get by default with the
Free Conversant hosting service has several of these. There is a really good Content Management system for running a website or mailing list using Conversant. (It's so good I became the Conversant Evangelist based on my experience using that very CMS.) There is a weblog/journal/newspage plugin. There is a very good Event Calendar to micromanage your time with. The basic part of Conversant, the messages, are accessed through a fairly competent discussion group application.
One caveat to this description is that Conversant is really, really flexible. Another is that it's really, really well integrated. So in your day to day use you will probably not find yourself thinking "okay, right now I am using the weblog plugin, okay now I am using the discussion group application"; instead you'll just click things and post things.
I mean, it's not like you have to launch a new program every time you want to do something. And your weblog postings connect to your Event Calendar listings that connect to your publishing pages that connect to....well, everything else.
That Lets Groups Work Together
Now we get to the reason Conversant was built in the first place. Give or take linkrot, some sample chapters of
Jon Udell's Practical Internet Groupware should be
available online. Groupware is any sort of technology that lets groups accomplish some task. I recently was reading a very elderly book titled
Groupware, author forgotten, that talked about things like videoconferencing systems and party phone lines, among other things. Got a bunch of humans who need to get something done and they're not right next to each other every instant? You could use some groupware to keep them working smoothly.
Yes, you could. Don't talk back to your elders.
Most groupware development now is based around computer software of one form or another. What is most important is that groups can be groups of anything trying to accomplish anything. Businesses are full of groups and subgroups. So are non-profits. A website could include any number of groups and subgroups--the traditional use of a content management system is to set up groups and subgroups of authors and editors and publishers and administrators.
Conversant understands groups at a fundamental level. It has a membership system, and any member can be a member of any group. Administrators can easily add or subtract people from groups. Groups can then be assigned to projects, or sections of a website, or particular mailing lists.
Over the Internet
If you're a typical visitor at this point in Becoming Conversant's life, you have signed up for free or paid hosting through Macrobyte, and you are happily plinking away at the browser-based admin system and trying to figure out how to run your website.
As you might know, there is more to the Internet than the web. Macrobyte Resources seems to understand this at a very basic level. So Conversant is not just a website management tool. It is also a group mailing list management tool. It is also a private newsgroup management tool. For the incredibly geeky, it even has a very full-featured XML-RPC interface.
In other words, it runs over the whole Internet. If you have access to a browser...or e-mail...or a newsreader...or some XML-RPC aware tool that someone wrote...
...you can be part of a Conversant-powered team. How frickin' cool is that?
Revision History
- 6 May 2002: Corrected all UserLand references to their proper StudlyCaps format.
- 7 May 2002: there's an "r" in "micromanage"; who knew?
- 7 May 2002: "beginnings of an XML-RPC interface" and "very full-featured XML-RPC interface" are entirely different things, or so I've been told.
- 8 May 2002 "Yea, verily, I say unto you, Street Tech is two words." And it was so.
