

Talkita Lets You Chat with Users Browsing the Same Sites as You - aaroneous
http://lifehacker.com/5715245/talkita-lets-you-chat-with-users-browsing-the-same-sites-as-you

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juliamae
When I "did" YC (S06), another one of the startups in my group was exactly
this... I believe they even had the same name...

OK just did a lil search, and it turns out they were called Talkito. So close!
<http://techcrunch.com/2006/11/09/the-y-combinator-companies>

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jarin
This idea seems to pop up over and over and over again, but I don't think it
will ever really take off until it's built into one or more major browsers.

_why's Hoodwink.d was pretty fun though. Since you had to discover it first
and then do a little bit of basic hacking to get in, it was a pretty neat
little community.

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JonnieCache
I didn't want to do this in the 90s, and I don't want to do it now.

I'm willing to bet that any website with the critical mass of users required
for there to be any likelihood that there will be enough people to chat with,
will be too popular for there to be a good enough quality of chatter for me to
want to chat to.

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guelo
I have a vague recollection about the first incarnation of a similar idea back
in the 90s. It allowed users to leave comments that were somehow overlayed on
top of the site. There was a backlash by websites worried about people leaving
negative reviews, there was something about the implementation that allowed
the web servers to block it.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

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jerf
ThirdVoice had the problem JonnieCache identified, you generally either had a
wasteland (long tail) or so many elements on the page it was as useless as a
YouTube comment set. And those were persistent comments; seems like this will
have the same sensitivity-to-conditions problems where a page(/domain/whatever
atomic unit) either has 1000 users or 0, only since there's no persistence it
all has to happen at once so you'll trend even more towards 0 and have an
even-smaller sweet spot. (20 notes on a page? Pleasantly active. 20 people
talking...?)

Since you mention it, I was the one who first worked out how to block
ThirdVoice; their little image tags were all assigned the same class and so
one CSS rule made them all display: none. They "fixed" that, so I made a JS
script that ran after theirs that could look at img source and remove them if
they were Third Voice's. At that point they changed their license to forbid
those who downloaded the program from "interfering with another user's
experience of the product", and while I would happily have refrained from
downloading it and clean-room implemented something, it was never an issue;
their day in the sun had passed.

Technical detail: ThirdVoice was implemented as an Internet Explorer plugin
that worked in the context of the page itself, so all the DOM nodes were
accessible within the page once ThirdVoice "fired", which, in a 1999 browser,
was a very noticable event. If in fact it was still around today, it would be
notorious for breaking otherwise-functional websites by changing the DOM in
ways the website didn't expect. They also had the usual bad HTML filtering, so
their product allowed you to insert cross-site scripting attacks into
arbitrary sites. I was able to convince <p onmouseover=""> to work, another
group discovered <bgsound src=""> worked as soon as you opened the note with
no further interaction. Fun times.

(And I count myself vindicated by time; this approach never took off, and the
one I advocated did, which was sites that aggregate links and collect comments
and communities on their own. Sites such as, oh, say, Hacker News. Or less
crowd-panderingly, Slashdot, MetaFilter, Digg, Reddit, etc. Please forgive me
if I take a moment to toss that in here, ten years later.)

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mayop100
There's a huge critical mass issue here that can't really be solved with a
browser extension. It's been tried many times. You can solve it with a couple
lines of javascript on the site though... so that everyone on the site gets to
chat regardless of whether they have a plugin or not. We've done it:
<http://www.envolve.com/>

~~~
dholowiski
That's what Meebo is doing too

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redwood
I love the concept here but wish it were a standard built into webpages:
anyone care to build such a thing <a chat room that exists at the bottom of a
story AND that lets you reference specific lines in a story... this way you
could, say ask "is this really correct?" to which someone could respond with
the wiki link/etc

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mahmud
I too had this stupid idea, and was pulled out of it when I proposed it to
someone "your customers can help each other", then he asked "but what if my
competition joins the site and talks them out of a purchase?".

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gojomo
Ubique 'Virtual Places' (1995) turned every web page into a chat room:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_places>

One early version even had avatars that appeared in page and could be
repositioned to move closer/further from other chatters.

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gnaritas
If I wanted to talk to other people, I wouldn't be sitting at my computer
browsing the web.

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GrandMasterBirt
HA! Facebook login required. Screw it.

