
Show HN: Chat with HN users while you visit HN - brildum
http://rabblr.com
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bdr
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
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
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
Don't forget Microsoft's chat system, which changes name every year.

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lars
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
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
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
He's likely referring to #startups on freenode. It's not official, but de
facto.

~~~
ohashi
You are correct.

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dazbradbury
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.

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

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lsiebert
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
Have you tried clicking on your (default) username to change it? That worked
for me.

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mkelley
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.

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alpb
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>

~~~
crazygringo
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
nah i think it's way better as it is, anonymous. no barrier to entry, no
privacy issues, plain old interwebs bliss

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crazygringo
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.

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jaredsohn
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".

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jamesu
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.

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jeswin
I am not making the same thing, but similar technique going on here.

FBRemix (very early state): <http://www.fbremix.com>

Edit: Source code <https://github.com/jeswin/fbremix>

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vlod
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.

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codedivine
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
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?

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Argher
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.

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

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

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adrianwaj
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
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
but how do you initially get the chat room up and running without their
cooperation.

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

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

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sirch
Very cool. How does it work?

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

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

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

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

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bdg
> Sorry, your user name must be 4 chars.

Why?

