KnowNow's secret sauce

I was contemplating what was so special about KnowNow and I came up w/ two features that encapsulate it all:

Dynamic creation of topics while enforcing permissions

The event router allowed you to create any topic and posts messages to them. And, anyone with the permissions could consume those messages. For e.g. let's say you run a web site and want to allow users on the web site to chat w/ each other - gmail supports this! How do you allow two users , say Fred & George, to start chatting with each other?

• Your back end systems need to create a secure channel where just the two of them can communicate and others cannot snoop, or even know of this conversation. How would you do this in JMS?
• What if Fred wants invite Harry into the conversation? Now, Fred needs to give permission to Harry to be able to read and write from that channel.

Imagine hundreds of such conversations and you run into problems with database storage, and near real time delivery. How does the server 'push' the information out?

Real time delivery to the browser

OK, so RIA is prevalent now. Well, it wasn't 7 years ago, I guess I would say it wasn't 4 years ago. Rohit & Adam's vision did come to reality!

Point is that with Comet and Ajax we now have browser apps that come close to rivaling fat applications on the desktop. Google docs is a great example! But, KnowNow could have given you that ability back in 2002! For your own applications on your web site!

I wonder if others out there (ex-KN, customers, or partners) think that some other features were unique???

It was a blast while it lasted!