

Your World of Text, my current side project. Requires FF3+ or Safari 4, I think. - bdr
http://www.yourworldoftext.com/

======
bdr
An explanation from the author: This isn't a startup, it's just an idea I
thought would be cool. I'm announcing it on HN first, hoping to get technical
and aesthetic feedback before I throw the URL around.

The two browsers in the submission title are the only ones I have on this
machine. Right now it doesn't run as smoothly as I'd want in FF3. There are a
couple big optimizations ideas I have, but I was comfortable enough to post
this without them. Was that a mistake? If you can try it out in some other
browsers I'd appreciate that. I have no idea what IE will do.

That's all. Hope you have fun.

~~~
yread
works OK in Opera 9 and 10

~~~
Pistos2
If it works in Opera, then it is too CPU-heavy on this older machine. I don't
understand what it is, and can't interact with it.

~~~
Torn
Using opera 10 beta, and all I see is a grey screen :(

------
petercooper
This site proves the old "normal person + anonymity == total retard" maxim.
Trending topics seem to be "gay", "penis", and "Django sucks" - lol.

~~~
3pt14159
Me and about 5 other people were talking about slashes, for like an hour. Made
up a good joke out of it:

\--Two slashes walk into a bar, one says to the other, "you got to make sure
you help me 'escape' from here"

Totally had a blast \\\\\\\\\

------
joez
Maybe have a minimap feature? In the right hand corner, or a way to jump to
the activity? I scrolled around for a while before I found where all the
action was.

Or a search feature. I think the trending topic is penis right now.

~~~
snprbob86
I added a top feature requests table with a votes column. Time to get our
collaboration on!

------
simanyay
<http://www.yourworldoftext.com/newsyc>

~~~
calcnerd256
Does it take the path as the name of the world?

~~~
Radix
Yes. <http://ianab.com/yourworld/>

------
auferstehung
This reminds me of the 34th Street wall.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Street_Wall>

------
joez
A few other suggestions:

It is too chaotic but I can see you taking this in different directions. You
need a way to direct the flow, potentially even in a useful direction (I am
thinking Yahoo/Mahalo Answers), or just like a trending topics feature in
which different worlds are based on tags.

Another thing you could do is to have a reset or form a new world every few
minutes. This way there is a new slate.

What you will probably need to end up doing in order to monetize this idea is
to build a site around it. User profiles, trending topics, different links,
regional worlds, answers, /random/, and /ANSI art/ (read: penises)

------
rwolf
It's painfully slow, and I ran into some glitches (ctrl v outputting only
first letter). pretty fun, anyway.

what about different (random) colors for different users, and a fade over time
so older words decay?

~~~
bdr
Ctrl-v is intentional. I want to keep it "natural" as long as possible,
although I'm sure someone will start crafting spammy POSTs soon enough.

------
zoba
I had a lot of fun when I drew a face, and then got to watch other people
alter (and improve!) it...until someone smeared through it with letters...

------
edw519

      ...................I love it!............................
      ........cool..........dont' overwrite thiWhere is my dog?
      .......................................I can't find u.....
      ..What about zoom?.........*&^*#$&^@*#&@*......this sux...
      ..........How about timeout?---Can't overwrite for x secs.
      ...-----..................................................
      Why are there no girls in HTML5 Canvas Experiment.........
      . . ................... ...              ....
      . . ..         8675309            
      ....                                          ...
      .....                     ...                 ...
      Creativity:10  ..........   Usefulness:Now a word from...
      ..a little too slow 
                                  CCCC  OOOO   OOOO  LL      ...
      ... needs.....             CC    OO  OO OO  OO LL
      . .  cut                   CC    OO  OO OO  OO LL
           and         ..        CC    OO  OO OO  OO LL
      .   paste                   CCCC  OOOO   OOOO  LLLLLL
      ..        
      .....   
      .                          It's lonely down here

~~~
bdr
btw, this comment made me really happy :)

------
PostOnce
Brilliant. Obviously the front page is full of spam but this will be super-
cool as soon as subcommunities establish what their page will be
(yourworldoftext.com/whateverpagehere) and I figure out how to find them. I
love it already.

------
omouse
I don't get it, what are you supposed to do?

~~~
Hexstream
Read and write. (You can scroll by dragging)

------
jlees
I love how everything's penis, or gay, or some variation thereof. Scrolling
around to find the more erudite conversations was remarkably fun though. I
kind of like it just as it is..

~~~
calcnerd256
if you find the good conversations, try to make breadcrumbs to them, but
nothing that attracts vandals

------
alex_c
Cool, it's multiplayer notepad!

Works in Chrome for Mac.

------
PostOnce
Hate to get spammy by commenting too much, but now that I've been using this
for two days, words fail to convey how brilliant I think it really is. It's
beautiful. It's art. It's a type of thing people rarely experience. I love it.
Thank you for creating it :)

edit: i want timestamps saved to some place every 10 minutes so that i can
explore it chronologically.

------
ryoshu
Fun, but someone kept deleting my Angband game.

------
diiq
So, it's chaos, and a lot of it is junk, but there's a good bit of good stuff
in there too.

If the interface were better (navigation & editing commands) that would be
sweet.

Privacy would be a matter of picking a distant enough location, if you could
jump to it.

I also want zooming, but that would be a pretty major undertaking.

------
prosa
This reminds me of the Million Dollar Homepage.

<http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/>

You could probably convince people to buy letters close to the "origin".

------
whyleyc
Doesn't work for me in Mosaic.

------
nikolayv
It does not appear to work for me in FF3 or Chrome at 6:23 PDT (linux).

~~~
optomas
Working here. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16)
Gecko/20080827 Firefox/2.0.0.16

ah. try ff2 maybe? Other possibility is that what ever issue you were having
has been fixed in the last five days.

Absolutely brilliant idea!

------
Raphael
Is there any way to navigate by keyboard?

------
kingkawn

        ==.
      /     \
     | 6  6 /
      \  - )  I am God.
       )  (

------
makecheck
Interesting. :) It works in OmniWeb 5.9 (WebKit-based, though an older
version).

------
jokull
It works in IE4. Just kidding.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
doesn't work in links2 either ;0)

~~~
calcnerd256
he should add telnet support

------
qeorge
Like it a lot! Its fun how it is, more features might take away the appeal.

------
peteysd
Backspace doesn't work for me but everything else does - I'm on Chrome.

~~~
mojombo
Same on webkit nightly. Needs more backspace!

~~~
bdr
I disabled backspace because I wasn't sure whether it should delete the char
before the cursor (better for typing) or under the cursor (more natural if you
click on something to delete it). Guess I'll just pick one... or have it
delete under only if you clicked there?

~~~
snprbob86
Definitely the character before. Delete key should delete the character under
the cursor.

~~~
bdr
It works now btw. You probably have to refresh.

------
die_sekte
I'm not sure what it is good for, but it looks and feels awesome.

------
jhrf
I enjoyed this immensley. I tried to make a kingdom of "x"s.

------
joepestro
Isn't working in FF3.5, but works fine for me in Safari 4.

~~~
JeremyChase
Worked fine for me in FF3.5.1

------
Oompa
Cool, but it's starting to drop some keystrokes for me.

------
oscardelben
I'd be interested to know how you did that.

------
mcotton
That is a really clever idea, I like it.

------
Sephr
Doesn't work in Shiretoko 3.5.3pre.

------
skip
Works in Chrome 2.0 on Vista.

------
PostOnce
subdirectories are case sensitive? pros and cons people, discuss!

------
cellis
wow that is addictive

------
cmkrnl
Very cool :)

------
dnaquin
Cool buddy.

