

Ask HN: Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com - mootymoots

Hi HN,<p>We'd love to get your feedback on a new chat and web sharing application called Chatterbloc that we have launched today. It takes chat one step further allowing participants to share links and view websites, video or flash movies together, at the same time.<p>The other part of this is the easy to create chat rooms (think of the ease of TinyChat), with features like Twitter integration, room history, live history searching, and of course the collaborative web sharing.<p>We'd love to get your constructive feedback on the app, we hope to iterate through new feature requests and bugs as often a possible.<p>Without further ado: http://www.chatterbloc.com<p>Thanks
Steve (http://www.reynoldsftw.com)
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mikewhyley
I've watched this through it's development and various iterations and I can
say that some serious dedication and work has gone into this. It's really
taking shape - good work guys ! Good Luck !

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sam_in_nyc
In no order as they come out...

Title attributes or tooltips for all buttons. I don't know what they do.

Fade the modal in/out faster, make hitting ESC or clicking the faded are close
the modal (the X is rather small)

More importantly, the whole way you manage going to URLs (and "freezing") is
very unintuitive and backward. For starters, the arrow to "type in a URL ...
[as far as I intially read]" points to an unfamiliar icon. I go there and see
"freeze" and "unfreeze" which makes no sense to me. Freeze what? It was not
clear that the main window was meant to show a URL rather than being an
introduction to the service.

Furthermore, I'd never expect that typing a URL in chat would control the
window on the right. It's a chat box. I type in it, and what I type goes into
the chat log.

I greatly suggest the following:

Put an address bar above the window, or in the window, and next to it a "lock"
or "freeze" button which says "prevents this URL from changing". Furthermore,
it'll pay dividends having this bar up there when you add more options.. like
maybe "new tab" and things like that.

Initially have the URL be the actual URL of your "welcome" page... (eg:
<http://chatterbloc.com/welcome_to_new_room.php>) It will immediately tell me
two things: "oh I can change the URL" and "I'm currently at the welcome page,
lemme see what it has to say."

Explain features and stuff at this welcome page.. like that I can type "goto
<url>" in chat to navigate . And that I can prevent navigation by freezing by
locking the URL.

Make back and forward buttons.

Finally, let me name the room and give me a short URL.

All in all, a nice little service akin to Gabbly, Twiddla, etc. I like the
iciness of it.

Hope this helps.

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antiismist
Works as expected, good job. It took me a while to figure out what the right
window does though.

Once I figured it out I had some fun with a chatterbloc inside a chatterblock
inside a chatterbloc.

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mootymoots
Thanks for the feedback - 2 excellent points!

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antiismist
Sort of a follow on ... right now the flow is:

    
    
      1: click a button
      2: select a user name
      3: join a room
    

You could eliminate step 2 (see, e.g. <http://etherpad.com>) and defer the
choosing of a username until later. That would make it even easier to use.

Also, there is a display bug where you try to join a room w/o picking a name
first - the message (Name cannot be empty) overflows the lightbox.

~~~
mootymoots
Thanks again, will add these points

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whyleyc
Great stuff Steve - my one big "want" would be permanent chat room names.

A bit like you can claim a userid or brandname on Twitter or email e.g.
<http://www.chatterbloc.com/manchesterunited> :-)

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sam_in_nyc
More stuff:

What is the point of "Reminder"? How about "share this room" instead.
Reminding typically means sending me something that is time sensitive.

Second, pop-up blocker comes up. Unless you're offering something extremely
compelling, I'd be so annoyed as to leave. Pop-up blocker shouldn't come up
for "onclick" events... you are doing something wrong in javascript.

Third.. the more I think about it, the more I wish you had an address bar up
there, and some sort of "help" thing near the chat window which would list out
commands, like "!map" and "!<url>" and stuff like that.

Best of luck.

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mtrichardson
This is pretty neat.

The UI is pretty, but somewhat distracting. Not enough contrast, I think, and
it could be more minimal.

Freeze wasn't super intuitive.

Having a history of what you've posted with thumbnails of previous things
might be neat, but might just end up being distracting.

The iframe thing, I go both sides on. I feel like sometimes I just want to
show a picture of it (luckily with Skitch this is a fairly trivial process).

It's really neat though, I'm enjoying it.

(oh, and, as soon as you can, I would recommend not using the twitter password
anti pattern and implement oauth there)

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scott_s
What's the benefit of this over email, IM or Skype? I already have
communication channels through those mediums for everyone I want to talk to.

Addendum: I just now realized you have a shared viewing feature. But I didn't
realize that from looking through your app, but from your description. Shared
viewing is what differentiates you from email, IM or Skype. You need to stress
it.

~~~
mootymoots
Thank you... good feedback. I have added some simple instructions in the web
view for now to get people started...

~~~
scott_s
That does clarify things, but users still have to go through several steps
before they see it. When I look at your front page, the only impression I get
is "web based group chat." You should elevate shared viewing to something you
mention first.

edit: You do have the material for that, but it's under the "View Sites
Together" tab. That information should be what I see first. Looking briefly at
your blog, you understand this is your killer feature. You need to make sure
your users understand that, too.

~~~
mootymoots
Thank you - Totally get what you mean - Will have a think.

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DavidPP
Got a small bug with website that do not "like" to be boxed (ex :
<http://hardware.fr>) Since they force a reload of the page, you can't access
the room anymore because you get redirected each time you try to access it.

~~~
mootymoots
yeah, thanks - we have this one on our list... Unsure if it's fixable
though...

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RK
It would be nice to have a back button for navigation.

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rokhayakebe
1\. What does freeze/unfreeze do? 2\. What does the screen do? (I thought when
I open window, participants would see it. Like if I opened Google and ran
queries, they would see the same) 3\. There is a bit of latency in your
messaging. Maybe 1 and a half seconds.

Otherwise if this application allows anyone to create throw away chat rooms
and share their browsing experience with one another, then I can frankly say I
love it. Great job.

~~~
mootymoots
freeze/unfreeze is to allow users to stop other users auto posting links to
their web view... maybe you're at work and don't trust the participants not to
post porn or something...

Unfortunately, You can only share links posted in the chat, once you navigate
away from that page in the web view, the "shared" experience disappears...
Something we're trying to work on.

Thanks for your feedback.

~~~
mtrichardson
Until you have that, it seems like just an image of the page would potentially
be more helpful, especially considering some people are logged in, some
aren't, etc.

