First Look: 9Cays

I was about to kick off a round of discussion regarding the next DC 2.0 get together, with my co-conspirators Dion Hinchcliffe and Ken Yarmosh, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to test out 9cays, which is a new tool to help manage email conversations as a collaborative space online.

I set up a 9cays account, and created a conversation by simply cc’ing go@9cays.com in the email to Dion and Ken. The email thread showed up as advertised in my 9cays conversations list. But when Ken replied, the text of his message didn’t show. I don’t know if that’s because he hasn’t gone through the process of registering, but he did ‘reply to all’ so go@9cays.com was cc’d.

You can see in the screenshot that Ken’s reply shows up in my later email.

9Cays looks like a simple way to manage discussion threads, and to put them up at a shared web page. While I may feel like threaded messages in Gmail are similar, they are not shared. Note that every conversation has an RSS feed too, so you can be notified through that mechanism if you’d like, or the RSS from a thread can be placed into some feed handler: for example, I could create a 9Cays conversation, then link that with a Typepad feed, and have it show up on a blog.

I haven’t spent enough time with 9Cays to figure out exactly how useful it is, or what other tools it is likely to displace or support, but I am intrigued.

[pointer from eHub]