The private virtual cafe

Once you click onto the concept of being able to be part of many discussion forums at the same time, there comes the very real problem of information overload. Being subscribed to many discussion groups can easily result in several megabytes of messages arriving daily. It is impossible to read all the messages.

This calls for another paradigm shift that again is only possible in the environment of the Internet. The creation of a personal private cafe that has all the advantages of the city sized cafe but is more practical to use. The shift here is to realise that a computer is not limited to the programs and applications that are designed for it. Intelligent use of proprietary programs or even shareware, can create a virtual program of any system you care to imagine.

This requires thinking beyond the applications and deciding for yourself what you want to use your computer for. Your computer RAM space can then become not the holder of applications but a part of your imagination for you to construct whatever scenario you see fit.

Why not then, use your imagination to create a personal cafe that is organised for your own personal convenience. In your mind, think of an empty cafe: a room full of tables. You add chairs, just sufficient to fill the cafe with the number of people it would be comfortable for you to maintain email relationships with. It can be five chairs, it can be ten, twenty, fifty or even more depending upon the time you want to commit to reading emails and responding to them.

In this virtual cafe, you can seat all the contacts you have formed co-operative associations with. On the screen it's a list of names; in your mind its all the people you have got to know and trust sitting around in a cafe waiting for you to email them. Although discussion will be by means of email correspondence, you can imagine sitting at the tables talking to them. You can use the parallel worlds trick and sit at several tables at the same time, having multiple simultaneous conversations.

You can arrange a selection of your contacts to sit at the same table with you and join in a discussion. This is easily arranged by including several people's names in the "To:" header of your emails. The recipients respond in the same way, by including the same list of names in the "To:" headers of their emails to the table. In this way, a private list serve is created with all emails being sent to everyone at the table. In the world of the Internet, this is analogous to a group of people sitting around a table in a real cafe and having a discussion.

Because these virtual table discussions are via emails, rather than real time chat, everyone can respond at their leisure. Also the parallel world concept can be brought into play again, so you can create several table discussions and take part in all of them at the same time. This can be likened to a chess player who plays several games at the same time with different opponents. Except these wouldn't be opponents, they'd be co-operating friends.

Remember this is an environment of your imagination, so, the people in your cafe needn't even be aware that they are in a cafe unless you share your imagination with them. As far as they are concerned, you are simply having an email correspondence with them. For you though, it is a convenient way to conceptualise your communication interface with the complex world of the Internet.

Around this cafe, you can imagine several virtual doors, each of which is an entrance to a different email discussion group. This is easily arranged in practice by having a file containing the email addresses with subscribe and unsubscribe messages for several chosen discussion groups. This makes it easy for you to pop into special interest discussion forums for short visits, and leaving whenever you like. Imagining this as going in and out of doors puts the discussion forums in perspective with the cafe.

You can go through these discussion forum doors to listen to discussions; take part in them; make contact with people; form relationships with them and then put them into your cafe. Once you have brought these people into your virtual cafe, you can go from table to table, speaking to them as you will.

In this way, you can have your own private cafe filled with lots off people who between them have a knowledge of what is happening in a variety of different discussion forums. This gives you the double option of going through one of the doors to a discussion forum of having a private discussion with somebody who is representative of the ideas and thoughts of the forum.

This virtual cafe then represents your intelligent interface to your real life contacts and their combined knowledge and experience. You can go to any of the people in the cafe or you can go through any of the doors into a discussion group to find an answer to a question or a solution to a problem. Using the phenomenon of parallel worlds you don't have to do this sequentially: you can do any number of these at the same time - giving you a dynamic connection to multiple sources of information where you can move ideas around, get new knowledge and get help with your problems.

More importantly, it becomes the way you have wired yourself into the multiple connectiveness of the internet. It is your way of tapping into its power and using the knowledge it contains in a way you can comfortably cope with.

This makes even greater sense if every one else in your cafe has a private cafe of their own. By virtue of your cafe you may have direct regular contact with fifty people. If each of these has fifty contacts in their cafe, you have indirect contact with two thousand five hundred people. If each of these have virtual cafes with fifty contacts, you have access to one hundred and twenty five thousand people - all within three email messages away.

It doesn't need much imagination to see how such connectivity can link the knowledge of every person on the Internet. It is this potential for massive Interactive connectivity that is the exciting prospect for the future of e-commerce and e-business.