4 ms·

Show HN: Chat with HN users while you visit HN

72 points by brildum 15y ago

crazygringo 15y ago
This is actually tremendously fascinating, and has a lot of potential. It is one of the coolest things I've ever seen on HN. 10 other HN users are on it now. (Tried nytimes.com, I was the only one.) What I'd really love to see would be a chat history, so I know what was going on "in the room" before I joined. To make it really effective, there could be some kind of threading, forum subjects, voting, etc. It would be amazing to check out a NYT article, have this pop up, and then immediately see people giving more context, making clever comments, etc.
alpb 15y ago
I remember a very similar startup that was doing more or less the same thing which has been a very popular in HN and some other websites, I just could not recall the name. Anyone remembers? edit: It could be envo.lv http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756145 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756145
- crazygringo 15y ago
  This kind of thing is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. To actually have one take off, I wonder if there's some way to link it to Facebook, to make it viral? Make it a Facebook app as well that interacts with comments you've left on pages you like? Or post your chat comments to Facebook? I don't know what it is, but I would love to see it happen.
  - czzarr 15y ago
    nah i think it's way better as it is, anonymous. no barrier to entry, no privacy issues, plain old interwebs bliss
- jamest 15y ago
  Founder of Envolve here; yes, we did build a version of Envolve for HN called envo.lv It was always intended to be a marketing gimmick. The critical mass required to sustain good conversation only lasted for the time the story was on the front page. Getting a website owner to install a chat system, (rather than just having an overlay) combined with integrating with site credentials will make an on-site chat system significantly more viable.
olalonde 15y ago
This has been tried a few times on HN before, can't find the links though.
adrianwaj 15y ago
chat history would be good.. my chat stopped dead.. would like to go back and review what's said. Bookmarklet can display how many people online and color-coded for activity level.
- ghayes 15y ago
  .. and it would be very convenient if it could stay up while on the same domain (e.g., a hidden top-level iframe?).
revorad 15y ago
What I've always wanted is HN with a chatroom attached to each submission instead of a comments page. That would be fun.
danielamitay 15y ago
Feedback: don't allow usernames "root", "admin", "administrator", et cetera.
lars 15y ago
I like this idea, but here's a word of warning: ICQ actually had software that did this about a hundred years ago. It was a stand alone app you would download, and you could chat with people viewing whatever webpage you were on. And I remember running into another person exactly once on this service, and that was while visiting altavista.com (this was before google). And this was from a company that presumably had a pretty strong ability to push software out to users. This can end up being the kind of software thats useless unless its used by millions. I'm sure there are smart ways to overcome that problem though.
- ohashi 15y ago
  I see a bigger problem of why would I want to chat with anyone just because they visited the same site? Strong communities probably already have a mechanism for that. If I want to talk to HNers I got to the IRC channel.
  - brackin 15y ago
    What's the IRC channel? I suppose this does show one flaw, if it isn't immediately obvious how to access a point of contact.
    - Raphael 15y ago
      He's likely referring to #startups on freenode. It's not official, but de facto.
      - ohashi 15y ago
        You are correct.
- twentysix 15y ago
  This could be a good idea if its implemented similar to disqus but used for chatting.
  - 15y ago
sirch 15y ago
Very cool. How does it work?
adrianwaj 15y ago
Perhaps you could adapt this to become an Olark competitor.. it's too expensive in my view.. for users to speak with site admins.
- ghayes 15y ago
  It's not really for site admins. For us, it has become a user-initiated sales channel with users reaching out to us on how our product will help in his or her situation.
  - adrianwaj 15y ago
    but how do you initially get the chat room up and running without their cooperation.
jaredsohn 15y ago
Amusingly, before I started using the Internet in the mid-nineties, I had thought that this functionality was a basic component to "surfing the web".
cad 15y ago
What do you have at the back-end?
DanielRibeiro 15y ago
This looks great! Awesome job. Would love to read more about which technologies you used to build it.
webwanderings 15y ago
Even Google has tried it and it didn't go anywhere.
- sparkie 15y ago
  Doesn't really mean much. Google have tried a lot of crap that never went anywhere.
dazbradbury 15y ago
At first, my thoughts were wow, that's simple and potentially really powerful. Then I opened it up.. and even on HN, the chat was a hard to follow trail of throw away comments. Chat is simply an extremely hard thing to moderate and present cleanly. Comments work, because most of the time, insightful/helpful comments are voted to the top. The way I see it is that chat is useful in a number of scenarios but I'm not sure this is it. I would suggest it's much more useful when: 1) You know the other people in the room, and it's not anonymous. If facebook were behind this, it may be useful, but the probability of someone you know browsing the same page as you is slim. It could work if it used 2 or 3 degrees of seperation however. 2) Liveness is key. Take olark for example, live and direct chat to customer service is extrmely useful. Alternatively, if you are covering a live event, it's much better to have live chat. Even if it's hard to follow at times, at least you know everything is current. Excellent use of a bookmarklet, and thanks for sharing, but it's going to be very difficult to make it usable.
jot 15y ago
Nice. Very similar idea to http://bonfire.im http://bonfire.im which is only for use at Twitter.com. Would be cool if it grabbed HN usernames somehow.
bdr 15y ago
This has been tried a dozen times. The chicken and egg problem is especially hard in real time. And in general, chat is dead. It's boring. The web has more to offer than it did when chat rooms were popular.
- jachwe 15y ago
  Chat is NOT dead. See campfire for example which even is a quite new chat tool. In fact, entire companies (including my own) are using chat for all their internal communication and were doing this for years. Maybe the anonym chatroom for teenager in the 90s is dead, but that is for good reason. The Chat as a tool itself is still really powerful and effective. (and widely used) The implementation of rabblr also is really cool. But i think the part with the anonymous users might be a problem. I just logged in for a few minutes and it was full of trolling. Also that you can't carry the chat over multiple pages is anoying, but there might be a way around that. Plus i really don't want to talk to random people on webpages. I probably want to talk to someone who can give me an information that i want, which would be a site adminstrator or company staff or whatever. Like olark. Or i want to talk to my friends or people i know, but i can do that on any IM that i got open anyway. So to sum it up. Nicely done, but i also doubt the usefulness of this tool.
  - alaskamiller 15y ago
    If you run a business, skype If you run a team, campfire If you're whiz kid running a team, hipchat If you work, gchat If you're a kid, facebook If you're old, yahoo If you're a nitwit, twitter
    - Raphael 15y ago
      Don't forget Microsoft's chat system, which changes name every year.
  - bdr 15y ago
    Hence the "in general". It still has its place for internal company tools. I often use IRC for technical help. Still, chat as we knew it, as some people still think of it, is dead.
jamesu 15y ago
There are just too many websites around for this to be useful. Not to mention if i go on a website, the last thing i am going to be thinking about is chatting with other people who happen to also be browsing it. Also the logistics of moderating a potentially infinite amount of chat rooms for every website on the internet are mind boggling to say the least.
vlod 15y ago
This was interesting and pretty cool MVP. I provided a whole bunch of suggestions. However it wasn't long before it degenerated into a cesspool. I really don't understand how people have time to waste in uttering such bollocks into the chat.
lsiebert 15y ago
On the latest chrome stable. I've gotten multiple errors trying to do this. Error: TypeError: Cannot call method 'track' of undefined Error: Error: INVALID_STATE_ERR Error: You must set a username before you can chat When I first login, it says I'm in a chatroom of 1 for quite a bit, then connects me invisibly, without letting me set my username. Would this fail with https? On a side note, somebody that creates an aggregator for these sort of add ons, (including chats, but also the various "comment on a website" things I remember from a few years ago) might do alright. When I finally do get in the chat, after trying to set a username, I get a random one. I'm user37695. And there is no way to change that. Edit: okay there is a way, clicking on your username. But it's invisible. Thoughts: Needs to let me know I'm connecting, and if possible, indicate state. IRC tells me when I'm connecting, when it's checking identd etc. Even a little progress bar would be fine. Username selection seems to fail for me. I'd suggest a prompt, after connecting, for the username. edit: indicating that clicking the username allows you to change it, or a menu button, would be helpful. There is no way to close the window without losing the page.
- tfb 15y ago
  Have you tried clicking on your (default) username to change it? That worked for me.
lsiebert 15y ago
just fyi, wait until your logged in, then you can change your username by clicking it.
codedivine 15y ago
It seems to be problematic on IE9 on Win 7. The chat window is left at the bottom of the page, and if I scroll up, the chat window remains at the bottom of the page. Thus, scrolling and chatting don't go together.
- codedivine 15y ago
  Not sure why I am being downvoted here. Is this working on IE9 for other people? Or am I being downvoted for testing something under IE?
Argher 15y ago
I'm actually alpha testing a more comprehensive chat service for chrome as we speak. If you're interested, shoot me an email at argher@gmail.com - I'd be happy for the feedback.
jeswin 15y ago
I am not making the same thing, but similar technique going on here. FBRemix (very early state): http://www.fbremix.com http://www.fbremix.com Edit: Source code https://github.com/jeswin/fbremix https://github.com/jeswin/fbremix
bdg 15y ago
> Sorry, your user name must be 4 chars. Why?
mkelley 15y ago
I think this is actually a pretty cool idea, but for it to be successful - 1) The app is a little rough around the edges... needs at the least a method for "flood protection." 2) Ability to adjust opacity, as it does take up a decent bit of real-estate. 3) MOST IMPORTANTLY - this is a great little bookmarklet app for community-driven websites like HN, reddit, etc... but the owners/admins of these sites need to PROMOTE the use of it. NOTE: This could also be popular on other types of sites as well. For example, when this was on the front-page and i tested it out there were a little over 30 users on chatting, today its moved down to item 64 in the list and no one is using it. So it would definitely need to be promoted by the site for it to become popular. I just had another thought, the developer of this bookmarklet could do a website that provides a list of web sites with the ability for user submissions and provide a sort of jump list. Hopefully there should be a way for the app to report the # of active users for each site in this scenario. Anyways, I like it.

72 points by brildum 15y ago

This is actually tremendously fascinating, and has a lot of potential. It is one of the coolest things I've ever seen on HN. 10 other HN users are on it now. (Tried nytimes.com, I was the only one.) What I'd really love to see would be a chat history, so I know what was going on "in the room" before I joined. To make it really effective, there could be some kind of threading, forum subjects, voting, etc. It would be amazing to check out a NYT article, have this pop up, and then immediately see people giving more context, making clever comments, etc.

alpb 15y ago

I remember a very similar startup that was doing more or less the same thing which has been a very popular in HN and some other websites, I just could not recall the name. Anyone remembers? edit: It could be envo.lv http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756145 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756145

crazygringo 15y ago
This kind of thing is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. To actually have one take off, I wonder if there's some way to link it to Facebook, to make it viral? Make it a Facebook app as well that interacts with comments you've left on pages you like? Or post your chat comments to Facebook? I don't know what it is, but I would love to see it happen.
- czzarr 15y ago
  nah i think it's way better as it is, anonymous. no barrier to entry, no privacy issues, plain old interwebs bliss
jamest 15y ago
Founder of Envolve here; yes, we did build a version of Envolve for HN called envo.lv It was always intended to be a marketing gimmick. The critical mass required to sustain good conversation only lasted for the time the story was on the front page. Getting a website owner to install a chat system, (rather than just having an overlay) combined with integrating with site credentials will make an on-site chat system significantly more viable.

olalonde 15y ago

This has been tried a few times on HN before, can't find the links though.

adrianwaj 15y ago

chat history would be good.. my chat stopped dead.. would like to go back and review what's said. Bookmarklet can display how many people online and color-coded for activity level.

ghayes 15y ago
.. and it would be very convenient if it could stay up while on the same domain (e.g., a hidden top-level iframe?).

revorad 15y ago

What I've always wanted is HN with a chatroom attached to each submission instead of a comments page. That would be fun.

danielamitay 15y ago

Feedback: don't allow usernames "root", "admin", "administrator", et cetera.

lars 15y ago

I like this idea, but here's a word of warning: ICQ actually had software that did this about a hundred years ago. It was a stand alone app you would download, and you could chat with people viewing whatever webpage you were on. And I remember running into another person exactly once on this service, and that was while visiting altavista.com (this was before google). And this was from a company that presumably had a pretty strong ability to push software out to users. This can end up being the kind of software thats useless unless its used by millions. I'm sure there are smart ways to overcome that problem though.

ohashi 15y ago
I see a bigger problem of why would I want to chat with anyone just because they visited the same site? Strong communities probably already have a mechanism for that. If I want to talk to HNers I got to the IRC channel.
- brackin 15y ago
  What's the IRC channel? I suppose this does show one flaw, if it isn't immediately obvious how to access a point of contact.
  - Raphael 15y ago
    He's likely referring to #startups on freenode. It's not official, but de facto.
    - ohashi 15y ago
      You are correct.
twentysix 15y ago
This could be a good idea if its implemented similar to disqus but used for chatting.
- 15y ago

sirch 15y ago

Very cool. How does it work?

adrianwaj 15y ago

Perhaps you could adapt this to become an Olark competitor.. it's too expensive in my view.. for users to speak with site admins.

ghayes 15y ago
It's not really for site admins. For us, it has become a user-initiated sales channel with users reaching out to us on how our product will help in his or her situation.
- adrianwaj 15y ago
  but how do you initially get the chat room up and running without their cooperation.

jaredsohn 15y ago

Amusingly, before I started using the Internet in the mid-nineties, I had thought that this functionality was a basic component to "surfing the web".

cad 15y ago

What do you have at the back-end?

DanielRibeiro 15y ago

This looks great! Awesome job. Would love to read more about which technologies you used to build it.

webwanderings 15y ago

Even Google has tried it and it didn't go anywhere.

sparkie 15y ago
Doesn't really mean much. Google have tried a lot of crap that never went anywhere.

dazbradbury 15y ago

At first, my thoughts were wow, that's simple and potentially really powerful. Then I opened it up.. and even on HN, the chat was a hard to follow trail of throw away comments. Chat is simply an extremely hard thing to moderate and present cleanly. Comments work, because most of the time, insightful/helpful comments are voted to the top. The way I see it is that chat is useful in a number of scenarios but I'm not sure this is it. I would suggest it's much more useful when: 1) You know the other people in the room, and it's not anonymous. If facebook were behind this, it may be useful, but the probability of someone you know browsing the same page as you is slim. It could work if it used 2 or 3 degrees of seperation however. 2) Liveness is key. Take olark for example, live and direct chat to customer service is extrmely useful. Alternatively, if you are covering a live event, it's much better to have live chat. Even if it's hard to follow at times, at least you know everything is current. Excellent use of a bookmarklet, and thanks for sharing, but it's going to be very difficult to make it usable.

jot 15y ago

Nice. Very similar idea to http://bonfire.im http://bonfire.im which is only for use at Twitter.com. Would be cool if it grabbed HN usernames somehow.

bdr 15y ago

This has been tried a dozen times. The chicken and egg problem is especially hard in real time. And in general, chat is dead. It's boring. The web has more to offer than it did when chat rooms were popular.

jachwe 15y ago
Chat is NOT dead. See campfire for example which even is a quite new chat tool. In fact, entire companies (including my own) are using chat for all their internal communication and were doing this for years. Maybe the anonym chatroom for teenager in the 90s is dead, but that is for good reason. The Chat as a tool itself is still really powerful and effective. (and widely used) The implementation of rabblr also is really cool. But i think the part with the anonymous users might be a problem. I just logged in for a few minutes and it was full of trolling. Also that you can't carry the chat over multiple pages is anoying, but there might be a way around that. Plus i really don't want to talk to random people on webpages. I probably want to talk to someone who can give me an information that i want, which would be a site adminstrator or company staff or whatever. Like olark. Or i want to talk to my friends or people i know, but i can do that on any IM that i got open anyway. So to sum it up. Nicely done, but i also doubt the usefulness of this tool.
- alaskamiller 15y ago
  If you run a business, skype If you run a team, campfire If you're whiz kid running a team, hipchat If you work, gchat If you're a kid, facebook If you're old, yahoo If you're a nitwit, twitter
  - Raphael 15y ago
    Don't forget Microsoft's chat system, which changes name every year.
- bdr 15y ago
  Hence the "in general". It still has its place for internal company tools. I often use IRC for technical help. Still, chat as we knew it, as some people still think of it, is dead.

jamesu 15y ago

There are just too many websites around for this to be useful. Not to mention if i go on a website, the last thing i am going to be thinking about is chatting with other people who happen to also be browsing it. Also the logistics of moderating a potentially infinite amount of chat rooms for every website on the internet are mind boggling to say the least.

vlod 15y ago

This was interesting and pretty cool MVP. I provided a whole bunch of suggestions. However it wasn't long before it degenerated into a cesspool. I really don't understand how people have time to waste in uttering such bollocks into the chat.

lsiebert 15y ago

On the latest chrome stable. I've gotten multiple errors trying to do this. Error: TypeError: Cannot call method 'track' of undefined Error: Error: INVALID_STATE_ERR Error: You must set a username before you can chat When I first login, it says I'm in a chatroom of 1 for quite a bit, then connects me invisibly, without letting me set my username. Would this fail with https? On a side note, somebody that creates an aggregator for these sort of add ons, (including chats, but also the various "comment on a website" things I remember from a few years ago) might do alright. When I finally do get in the chat, after trying to set a username, I get a random one. I'm user37695. And there is no way to change that. Edit: okay there is a way, clicking on your username. But it's invisible. Thoughts: Needs to let me know I'm connecting, and if possible, indicate state. IRC tells me when I'm connecting, when it's checking identd etc. Even a little progress bar would be fine. Username selection seems to fail for me. I'd suggest a prompt, after connecting, for the username. edit: indicating that clicking the username allows you to change it, or a menu button, would be helpful. There is no way to close the window without losing the page.

tfb 15y ago
Have you tried clicking on your (default) username to change it? That worked for me.

lsiebert 15y ago

just fyi, wait until your logged in, then you can change your username by clicking it.

codedivine 15y ago

It seems to be problematic on IE9 on Win 7. The chat window is left at the bottom of the page, and if I scroll up, the chat window remains at the bottom of the page. Thus, scrolling and chatting don't go together.

codedivine 15y ago
Not sure why I am being downvoted here. Is this working on IE9 for other people? Or am I being downvoted for testing something under IE?

Argher 15y ago

I'm actually alpha testing a more comprehensive chat service for chrome as we speak. If you're interested, shoot me an email at argher@gmail.com - I'd be happy for the feedback.

jeswin 15y ago

I am not making the same thing, but similar technique going on here. FBRemix (very early state): http://www.fbremix.com http://www.fbremix.com Edit: Source code https://github.com/jeswin/fbremix https://github.com/jeswin/fbremix

bdg 15y ago

> Sorry, your user name must be 4 chars. Why?

mkelley 15y ago

I think this is actually a pretty cool idea, but for it to be successful - 1) The app is a little rough around the edges... needs at the least a method for "flood protection." 2) Ability to adjust opacity, as it does take up a decent bit of real-estate. 3) MOST IMPORTANTLY - this is a great little bookmarklet app for community-driven websites like HN, reddit, etc... but the owners/admins of these sites need to PROMOTE the use of it. NOTE: This could also be popular on other types of sites as well. For example, when this was on the front-page and i tested it out there were a little over 30 users on chatting, today its moved down to item 64 in the list and no one is using it. So it would definitely need to be promoted by the site for it to become popular. I just had another thought, the developer of this bookmarklet could do a website that provides a list of web sites with the ability for user submissions and provide a sort of jump list. Hopefully there should be a way for the app to report the # of active users for each site in this scenario. Anyways, I like it.