An intertwining of threads
Those who communicate online each have their own preferences for the protocols and user agents they use; some of those preferences are based on aesthetic or familiarity, some are based on the kind of communication, some are based on technical capabilities in areas such as privacy/security, search/history or configurability/customization and some just default to the preferences of their personal network. Each individual and each community gives more or less weight to strengths in various areas such as ease of use.
OpenKnot is an attempt to build a service that will allow everyone to use their preferred user agents and paradigms to participate in communication communities, taking some of the best ideas from email, mailing lists, usenet, zephyr, IRC, XMPP, various kinds of web forums, SMS and more.
The fundamental idea is that:
Decoupling the messages/threads/channels from the transport/storage mechanisms allows the user agent software maximum flexibility to present information and functionality in a manner that is delightful to the human.