These are just MUD/IRC/IM related scraps of thought trails accumulated over the past couple of weeks.  Actually, most of them are resurfaced scraps from long past but I turned them over like one would a flipjack so I thought I should park them on my blog so I can look it up next time they resurface.

• IRC channels as rooms in a MUD – an IRC channel is, in essence, a bunch of people talking in a room.  Everyone can hear and see each other (unless they are whispering or lurking invisibly).  It's just like being at a same location in a MUD.
• IM session inside a MUD – IM is like talking inside a private room in a MUD.  Overlaying the room metaphor gives persistence to sessions and storage for shared objects.
• Wiki page as a room, an object, or a thread of conversation inside a MUD.
• Topic or thread of conversation as an object – threads of conversations are constantly created and updated and 'leads' to the threads can be found by where, when, who, and what.  So if you enter a room where a conversation took place there some time ago, you can find it and, if you want, pocket it to keep track.  In a sense, you are subscribing to a feed.
• Googling conversations in IRC and MUD – this is self evident so I won't explain.  A hack implementation can just generate a web page per thread of conversation and let Google index them.
• NPC as IRC bots – enough said other than that they should be easily programmable, customizable, and deployable.
  • Fido, open the report.
  • Fido> Which report?  I have…
• MUD objects with MIME types and custom renderers – images are displayed, audio and movies are played, spreadsheet is displayed using Excel, etc.  Thumbnails of these objects are displayed when 'see' command is invoked.