
Instantly Add Chat To Hacker News - mayop100
http://envo.lv/http://news.ycombinator.com
======
lhnz
This is nice. But a couple of thoughts:

1\. Use will die down over time as people won't want to browse with it running
constantly. Perhaps you could create Chrome/Firefox addons with acceptable
privacy policies which just popup a notification or display something in your
status bar if you access a page with users that are chatting? Just to remind
you that the functionality exists...

2\. I just saw someody create a room with the same name as another room. They
couldn't see the room I had created...

3\. A little slow currently perhaps due to the number of users. Maybe that's
just my machine.

4\. Was surprised to see that everybody dropped trying to sound clever as soon
as chat is realtime. Is a reputation system needed always?

5\. Some way of bringing conversations back which you've closed...

~~~
Qz
_4\. Was surprised to see that everybody dropped trying to sound clever as
soon as chat is realtime. Is a reputation system needed always?_

Not surprising at all considering the typical interpersonal communication has
been getting faster, shorter, and less intelligent for decades.

~~~
codabrink
I believe it's more about chat being more personal, where comment conversation
is meant be more professional by convention. In chat, we're not bound by the
rating system, and there's not really an official topic.

------
davidhollander
This is the same business idea as gooey.com, a dot com bust
[http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/02/my-name-is-james-a-
and-...](http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/02/my-name-is-james-a-and-im-an-
alcoholic/)

However, they required that you download a separate piece of software. This
AJAX and feels more spontaneous, easy to get started, probably resulting in a
much higher growth rate.

~~~
mayop100
Our main business is integrated chat software. This is just a side project to
showcase our tech. This was put together in day by a new employee.

~~~
christoph
Props to the new hire.

Props to you for finding/hiring him.

------
netghost
The floating tweet/like box is atrocious. Otherwise, kind of neat.

~~~
mayop100
We were thinking maybe we'd remove it if someone retweets us : )

------
noelsequeira
While the envolve plugin is extremely interesting, the HN implementation would
probably be far more useful if you scraped the HN username for logged-in users
and displayed it. Anonymity seems to kill the utility of chat. For those that
wish to participate anonymously, you can always offer the option to opt out.

Using jQuery, this should be trivial:

$(".pagetop").children('a[href*="user?id="]').attr("href").split('=')[1];

~~~
Xk
The current implementation uses an iframe and so they can't read the data out
of the iframe (same-origin policy).

This would require injecting javascript on to news.ycombinator.com. It
wouldn't be so bad, but it would require user interaction to do that. If it
requires user interaction then it'll be less used.

Granted, they could make an extension which does that -- but now you have to
download something just to use chat. That's a big barrier to entry.

------
mgl
Can you imagine embedding this by Google on any search results page, so we can
discuss "hotel las vegas" queries with other participants in real time,
luckily with hotel agents answering questions as well? And now SEO would be
used to find the most intensive chat topics. Neat!

------
sgrove
Using this as I add in this comment - talking about hackathons with somepeople
in the news.ycombinator.com channel, and looks like I might have found a much
more interesting way to spend my weekend!

Sites with strong identities (like HN) have a lot to gain with something like
envolve. We get a bit more freeform discussion that's still organized.

The only two concerns I have are 1.) will we lose historical discussions since
they're played out in an external system? and 2.) Flamewars - they're bad
enough when there's some forced wait-time between replies. Bringing in real-
time chat could make it much, much worse :)

Awesome job to the envolve guys!

~~~
mayop100
Thanks! We're working hard to address both those issues. Much more to come
soon.

------
dbz
Well, I have a couple of thoughts:

While the FB chat layout has its many benefits such as non-techy users will be
(most likely) used to it, the small chat area really isn't enough for big
sites such as HN or Reddit where there can be many many users online at once.

It would be nice if it could plug into fb chat, google+, AIM/AOL, etc.
however, I'm not quite sure how viable of an option that is.

It also seems that anyone can make a chat (I could be wrong), but that seems
like a silly add-on for a site with as many users as HN because it will only
take one troll to bother everyone.

P.S.

Awesome Job

~~~
jules
Yes, it would be nice if you could move it to the side. With widescreen
monitors the horizontal space is often more than 50% unused (and it is on HN
on my screen). So you can use the entire right half of the screen for chat and
you wouldn't use precious vertical space.

------
davidw
Seems like a good time to mention #startups on irc.freenode.net

------
avgarrison
This is rather cool, however I was alarmed when another user was able to
inject javascript and throw up an alert window in my browser. This begs the
question, does this wrapper site do anything to protect me from XSS? Does it
prevent someone from stealing my cookies?
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/protecting-your-
coo...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/protecting-your-cookies-
httponly.html)

------
tnorthcutt
Nice, except for the on by default noises. Ugh.

~~~
alexkiwi
Thats one of the biggest complaints we get on <http://console.fm>, everyone
loves the service though!!! Envolve is fantastic!!!

~~~
mayop100
There's actually an option to default the sound to off by default if you want
to. Just set defaultSoundMode : false in the envoOptions

------
mayop100
Strange that it's slow. Where are you located? Our servers are in the SF bay
area.

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Alexx
Is there a particular reason you went with short polling over sockets? I see
your building on jetty at the moment, which is pretty tried and tested I
guess, but pushing a huge volume of json objects around over the http.

------
rokhayakebe
I had a holy s _& % moment. I have seen this sort of tech before, but this is
just a perfect implementation. It could become my default way to browse social
sites. Hello social shopping.

Edit: Holy S_$^, Holy S*$^.

~~~
coderdude
I felt the same way when I tried it out. This is exceptionally cool. My first
instinct was to tell my friends about it. Only problem is this has to have a
lot of users in order for it to be useful on random sites. Other than that
though, this is killer.

------
skennedy
Pretty cool implications for helpdesks (login page of an enterprise
application), website design reviews, discussions of news articles, and so
much more. I really like it.

~~~
mayop100
If you want to add it to your own website you can do so by just cutting &
pasting some javascript. Check it out: <http://www.envolve.com>

------
there
this is how it looks on a maximized browser on an 11" macbook air:

<http://i.imgur.com/VpTFE.png>

not enough room to see all of the text.

~~~
mayop100
Gotcha. Yeah, maybe we'll do what facebook does and reverse that last window
so it overlaps and in the other direction.

------
mayop100
We have a bookmarklet you can install. Check out <http://envo.lv> We also have
a "Chat About This" button that site owners can add to their own pages.

Follow us on twitter too for updates on our upcoming developer tools launch.
We're <http://www.twitter.com/getenvolved>

------
mtogo
Very cool and very well done, but on Opera for some reason the HN background
starts cycling through various colors.

Now would also be a good time to mention HN's IRC channel, which is #startups
on irc.freenode.net ( <http://webchat.freenode.net?channels=startups> ).

------
politician
I'd like to see this running on my Google TV, so that I can chat about the
latest celeb trial that HLN is providing wall-to-wall coverage for. That's not
quite true, they usually manage to mix in Tweets and Youtube videos. Anyway,
the point is that it'd make certain channels far more interesting.

Edit: Via the Google TV SDK, of course.

------
veb
I could imagine this being very useful for the initial building of a following
for a startup. Let's say some people share your passion - they can talk to
people about it, and rally to get some features done or something.

Good job guys, I quite like the implementation, I hope to use it myself
actually.

~~~
mayop100
Absolutely! Throw us up on launch day so you can get instant feedback on your
product.

------
kgthegreat
I think its fun. Kept lot of us engaged for a while. But you need to build
context around the chats. Meanderers will meander. Great chances of it going
out of control. Which are the best sites to sell this to?

------
blendergasket
What a great idea! It'd be cool if there were some way to create color coded
mice/pointers so people could point to places on the page, or find some way
for users to highlight some parts. I love it!

------
Pistos2
In Opera, my "this page is still loading" bar keeps popping up every 200 ms or
so. Extremely distracting, and (in my case) it obscures the lower bar of
envo.lv.

------
massarog
Require users to sign in with their HN info before being able to chat, that
way you don't have a ton of people trolling in the chat with fake usernames.

------
snguyen
I'm so impressed! It'd be nice if there was support for IRC commands since it
seems to be omnipresent in chat applications. :)

~~~
mayop100
Thanks! Not yet, but we're adding features as fast as our little fingers can
type...

------
mayop100
We (Envolve) are hiring developers, so if you want to talk to us, drop an
email to info@envolve.com.

------
jechen
This is really nifty, though it's a little slow redirecting on my end (in SF).
:) Great job!

------
Tyrant505
Startups Seeking Devs chat was created 15 minutes ago. Let us see what
happens! heh

------
auston
Nice work! But I wish when I clicked a thread, it brought me to that URL as a
room.

------
seanmccann
It would be great if it was just a JS plugin rather than redirecting.

------
rishi
This is very cool! How does it work with my websites SSL?

~~~
mayop100
not sure what you mean... it uses an iframe to display the webpage and adds
the chat to the parent page.

~~~
rishi
got it. Thanks for answering my question.

------
bane
really cool idea...wish I could pin a couple chat windows open at once...

------
vapour
annnnd it's crashed.

------
joejohnson
This is very well done

------
funthree
I made a node.js bookmarklet about 5-6 months ago that is sort of the same
concept. It is not nearly as full-featured, though. If anyone would like the
source, just let me know, as it is a dead project.

It's a bit different in methodology than what OP posted, as it will run on any
website, without having to go to another website (or refresh, or anything) but
it violates a bunch of browser protocols in the process ;) (it is safe though)

Just make a bookmarklet out of this, or run it on any website.

    
    
       javascript:var s = document.createElement('script');s.type='text/javascript';document.body.appendChild(s);s.src='http://184.106.196.246:8002/js-global/load.js';void(0);
    

p.s.: no promises it wont explode ;)

~~~
danecjensen
I'd like to check that out. Can you point me to it or email me (check profile
for address).

~~~
funthree
Will do!

~~~
danecjensen
Don't forget to send it please.

------
klbarry
Best business application is you know you're going to get a ton of buzz in a
very short period of time. Get people in a chat and get them excited, keep
those customers at a much higher rate.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I second this KL. I was thinking, I want these guys to super succeed.

------
dreamdu5t
Very well executed.

It seems slow, like it's built using AJAX/PHP/MySQL. What stack powers this
thing?

~~~
jonursenbach
FUD. Just because something is built using AJAX/PHP/MySQL doesn't mean it's
slow.

~~~
burgerbrain
Regardless, it does seem quite slow.

