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Chat.center and Facebook's Unique Chat ID
On Saturday I published a story on Medium called "Dear Zuck, What the Fuck" - https://medium.com/@kteare/dear-zuck-fuck-84d9c1bdba26#.8mm0qbhhz. Insiders here at HN described it as link bait. Another said he didn't understand the point. Commenters said that the accusation related to the look of FB Messenger and that this look is common to many apps, including iMessage and others that pre-date chat.center.
These comments miss the point. Of course there are links in my story, although they are clearly not bait... This is the internet, so I did use the basic link tools. But the links are not "bait". The intent of the links is clear from the context and nobody who clicks would have been baited.
More inportant. The article does not accuse Facebook of copying a UI. Indeed it explicitly says that may be a reasonable and obvious UI. It accuses them of copying the entire concept of a Unique chat ID (a human readable URL pointing to a SaaS chat service), and then of linking that from any end point - to the owner of the ID via a Webb and mobile app, linked via SaaS.
Until Friday chat.center was novel in offering such a service. We fully integrate into the DNS using this approach, making chat ID's open. There is no requirement of a clicker to "join" anything.
Facebook has definitely duplicated our service. They may or may not have copied it.
These are reasonable reasons for my article and for my complaint, but also reasons for explaining to the world what has happened and what I as the founder of chat.center think about it.
To put this article into the context of click bait, or to suggest I am complaining about a UI being stolen are both mistaken.
Keith Teare
http://chat.center/keith
- herbst 11y agoare you claiming you are the first SaaS that provides a chat with a direct url? seriously?
- arrty88 11y agokeep fighting the good fight. do you have a mobile app? sms integration? auto responders? group chat?
- kteare 11y agoWe have IOS, Android and web apps. We have group chat. Auto-Responders 6-8 weeks away
- minimaxir 11y agoLink to referenced HN discussion as I don't feel the proposed characterization is accurate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11463349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11463349 None of those commenters called it linkbait.
- kteare 11y agoNo. I am claiming we are the first to use a human readable ID in a URL, integrated with the DNS
- kteare 11y agoI just published a longer form of this here - https://medium.com/@kteare/zuck-what-the-fuck-rebuttal-a-follow-up-19c915e89081#.j2y39wvhy https://medium.com/@kteare/zuck-what-the-fuck-rebuttal-a-fol...