Looking at the 40 message long branching conversation happening in general right now, it makes me wish google wave had survived. It was this magical superset of google docs, reddit, and slack that was just too strange to live.

Not quite wave, but still related: There's been a bunch of interesting work from people in the vis community about visualizing conversations on the internet. Such as convis (for slashdot threads), treeverse (for twitter threads) and my own forum explorer (for hn threads). I have a little write up of these things here: https://www.mcnutt.in/assets/forum-explorer-paper.pdf

And glue chat from @Max Krieger! https://a9.io/glue-comic/

Thanks for the links @yoshiki. I feel like we need a semantic zoom alert.