
Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every site you're browsing. - bkanber
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/affmlbhoebcjponkmlmoeinojjcggbnk
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AshleysBrain
Is it me or do I see a "add a live chat room to every website!" startup/idea
every 6 months, either by apps, HTML framesets, whatever, then followed by
press saying it will change the world/internet/whatever, then I never hear
about it again. Perhaps nobody actually wants an anonymous chat room on every
site :P

~~~
mixmax
That's because it's a classical chicken and egg problem - the idea is only
valuable if a _lot_ of people use it.

Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation:

If I go to Hacker news, what are the chances there'll be someone to chat with?
Well, according to <http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm> there are
currently around 2 billion Internet users, and if we assume that at any given
point 10.000 people are on Hacker news then one out of 200.000 global users
are available to chat on this site at this moment. What this means is
basically that unless you have an installed base of millions there will be
noone to talk to. And you won't get that base because there's noone to talk
to...

It's simple math, and noone seems to do the numbers before they launch
something like this.

~~~
zyfo
While I agree in principle this example is bad - chances for someone to be on
HN or any other techno-startup site are _much_ bigger.

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pygy_
_why was one of the first to implement this, in 2005. It wasn't a chat, but a
comment system for hackers.

The installation instructions were intentionaly elusive:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20051125122020/http://hoodwinkd.h...](http://web.archive.org/web/20051125122020/http://hoodwinkd.hobix.com/)

The IP adresses point to DNS servers that serve two custom domains: hoodwink.d
and ___._ (or you could add them to your host file? not sure...).

From there you could browse those sites that had further info, and enjoined
you to install a greasemonkey script that injected the comment div in the
target pages.

To add hoodwink'd comments to a site, you had to register it at hoodwink.d,
with an URL regexp to recognize the site, and an xpath query to locate the
point where the comment thread would be inserted.

There were also RSS feeds, that allowed to follow a commenter, or get all the
updates of a given site.

Cool stuff. .

Here is some more info

A longer description: <http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2006/01/hoodwinkd.html>

Magnus Holm, debugging the system: <http://oldblog.judofyr.net/posts/who-
broke-hoodwinkd.html>

A few screenshots:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbyrussell/3838274563/in/phot...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbyrussell/3838274563/in/photostream/)

~~~
judofyr
Hoodwink'd was a fun project. You really felt like you were sneaking around
the interwebs, leaving comments and sharing links to a tiny community.

I also have a theory that many of _why's (earliest) most known projects were
created because of Hoodwink'd. He needed a web framework, so he wrote Camping.
He wanted to write the HTML in Ruby, so he wrote Markaby. In order to inject
the hoodwinks into the web page you need a proxy, so he wrote mouseHole. And
he wanted a simple way to search and replace HTML in the proxy, so he wrote
Hpricot. It's all one big family…

~~~
pygy_
This reminds me of the first camping announcement.

He spent perhaps half an hour, probably more, frantically adding surrealist
images to the post. I imagined him excited as a kid, stuck in a creativity
rut. Good memories.

Do you know how long it took him to write Camping?

------
ansy
This always seems like such a good idea to me. Like walking around a busy city
bustling with people all around.

But then I realize I would never use it. The idea of broadcasting my browsing
habits page by page to a third party is creepy beyond belief.

~~~
bkanber
That's exactly why SiteChat is anonymous and doesn't save _anything_ on the
server! :)

~~~
ansy
While I give the author the benefit of the doubt he or she has every intent to
respect privacy, if I really care about my own privacy I should do what I can
to protect it myself before I place my trust in a third party.

It's like revealing my own secret to someone and telling them not to tell
anyone else. I have the most to lose if my secret is revealed. If that isn't
enough for me to keep it to myself what is preventing anyone else from
revealing it?

Because I don't care to let people follow my browsing behavior site by site, I
had better not broadcast it to begin with.

EDIT: I should add, I do have some initial doubts about the anonymity
guarantees in this extension. Is all traffic encrypted? Can I be sure nothing
is getting unintentionally logged by say a forgotten debug statement or server
request logs? I've seen credit card numbers turn up in Apache access logs. Is
my IP actually obscured from others or is it merely my name? Even Tor is
hesitant to guarantee anonymity.

------
donohoe
If a large % of Facebook users used this, it would quickly become unusable on
the site.

Any ideas about handling large usage - separate people out into smaller
manageable groups by IP/geo/other?

~~~
bkanber
At present, if a large % of my apartment building used this, it would quickly
trash my server ;).

My intention is to just see how things develop, and if I need to upgrade
servers and write some more intelligent routing, then I absolutely will. :)

~~~
l0c0b0x
Sweet app man!

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tzs
I once tried to convince my employer to let me do something like this via a
Java applet in the banner ads we were running (yes, banner ads can include
applets). The idea was that all the people seeing our ad could chat among
themselves, and the hope was the would be unusual enough to get people to
actually notice the ad.

Sadly, they wouldn't let me try it.

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bkanber
If people start using it, it could have very interesting social implications.
Live communities can form for different sites--facebook, reddit, HN, youtube--
and each community would be interesting to observe.

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mtinkerhess
Really cool, I've been waiting for something like this to come along and be
executed right so that it will pick up traction. We'll see if this is the
one...

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keithbeaudoin
Maybe you should take a look at SideSpeech (<http://www.sidespeech.com>)

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McButterbuns
I'm curious about the privacy issues around this. Can your chats (and browsing
info) be traced back to you?

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sp332
Where are the comments hosted? How long are they kept? Are they censored or
moderated? Are there rules?

~~~
bkanber
Comments are not hosted, they're passed through a relay server and immediately
discarded. There's no censorship or moderation, other than stripping out HTML
tags. No rules whatsoever.

~~~
sp332
Oh, so you don't see comments that were made before you get to the site.

~~~
bkanber
Correct, you only start listening once you get there. This is intended to be
more of a flash-mob style application, rather than a reliable communication
application

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MikeCapone
I bet the chat on HN could be interesting.. Not sure about most other sites,
though.

~~~
chwahoo
Probably also on sites linked from HN.

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suyash
no need for GCaht, gacebook chat etc..now..wow..this is cool!!

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kbeaudoin
You guys should have a look at sidespeech.com

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zupeanut
Tweet size this shit for spam prevention pleaaaase!

