Crossing the bridge of weak ties. Once upon a time (1998-1999) I wrote a book about software that could revolutionize how we communicate. That software, I thought, was the fully-deployed but poorly-appreciated NNTP newsreader and its companion server. Netscape had radically modernized these ancient tools, and Microsoft did a great job of cloning them. I figured that the rich-text message composer and reader, common to both the familiar mailreader and the obscure newsreader, would popularize NNTP and usher in the era of what I called Internet groupware. … [Jon's Radio]