

Show HN: Also Viewing – “Sally is also viewing this page” as a service - paulrosenzweig
https://www.alsoviewing.com

======
nudpiedo
Some feedback.

The first thing I though "oh again someone trying to solve the same problem".
I remember from CVS locks up to CRM messages saying "the user X is editing
this document, See draft [here]".

The second though... for just a small feature like this one I would never pay
$24/month ... especially when I build my own CRM/system. However one single
payment for a feature with no upgrade possibility could be acceptable
(especially if it is cheaper than my development time AND it integrates good
with my system).

EDIT: please note I do not pretend to be "destructive", just as I said, I
wanted to give feedback.

~~~
paulrosenzweig
Thank you I really appreciate your feedback!

I certainly don't understand my potentials customers as well as I should. Are
you part of a company or just you? Is your CRM software just used by a few
people.

One-off payment is an interesting model, but hard make work with services.
Though I think it works wonderfully with products like Arq
([https://www.arqbackup.com/](https://www.arqbackup.com/)). How much would you
be willing pay as a one-time fee?

------
rwallace
My first reaction was 'huh? Why would I care if Sally is also viewing this
page?'

Looking at what it says on your website, it's clearer: what you really care
about is if Sally is also _editing_ , not viewing. That does solve a problem
(short of having proper version control; non-programmers aren't going to learn
to use Git).

So the terminology needs to be fixed. But does it actually show editing, not
viewing?

~~~
paulrosenzweig
If someone is viewing an edit page but hasn't changed anything yet, are they
viewing or editing? I'm not really sure. But, you make a good point that
_editing_ is the important action.

Though I guess this is really just about the default text. It's very easy to
customize the banners to say "Sally is also editing this page.".

~~~
kozak
Sure you can change the text, but from sales perspective you'd better put more
emphasis on "editing" rather than "viewing".

~~~
paulrosenzweig
Oh I see what you're saying. Also Viewing was actually called "Edit Guard"
originally. I'll figure out how to tweak the copy. Thanks for you thoughts!

------
felixding
Some feedback from someone who's running a customer support SaaS with some
thousands of users.

Tickets is our core feature. And we indeed have the requirement to show that
'Someone is also viewing this ticket'.

But the more important feature we need is to sync changes to a ticket across
users. For example, if user X re-assignes the ticket to user Y, people who are
viewing this ticket should be able to see the change without refreshing.

Knowing someone else is also viewing a ticket is not particularly useful for a
ticketing system, because even if I know a ticket is viewing by others, I
still need to do what I'm supposed to do (reply, re-assign or whatever).

I guess Also Viewing is great for websites where users feel comfortable doing
something with others, and they don't make much changes to the UI. For
instance, watching videos or listening to music with friends.

By the way, I personally know Paul (the author) and I wish Also Viewing could
become popular.

------
hrbrtglm
Trying to connect to your website, my browser tells me your certificate has
been signed by an unknown authority. Weird, comodo seems legit to me ... but
happens with chrome and safari.

~~~
paulrosenzweig
Thanks for letting me know. It works for me in both Chrome and Safari. Is it
still happening? What versions are you using? Thank you for the report!

~~~
hrbrtglm
Chrome 43.0.2357.81 Safari 8.0.6

[http://imgur.com/s4yQqLk](http://imgur.com/s4yQqLk)

~~~
paulrosenzweig
Thanks. Weird that I'm using the same version of Chrome. I do see a bunch of
client SSL issues in my logs, so it's not just you.

------
kozak
I upvoted this specifically to see a discussion of whether such small features
can/should be productized.

~~~
paulrosenzweig
Haha well I appreciate the upvote!

I think you pose an interesting question. Also Viewing adds very simple
feature and many sites choose implement it themselves.

I think it makes sense as a service because adding this feature usually
requires setting up another server to handle the real-time connections. If
you're building another Google Docs then the real-time communication is your
core competancy, but if you're building a line of business CRUD Rails/Java/PHP
app, then it's much simpler to add two lines of code and not worry about
maintaining the additional infrastructure.

