Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Show HN: Chat in a virtual world - Node Knockout entry (minilife.me)
36 points by newy on Aug 30, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments



Urgh, sign in with facebook? Pretty cool otherwise.


This was my reservation as well. I'm pretty stingy about who I give Facebook access to.


Was going to do Twitter also, but didn't have enough time.


I was actually confused by this: it wasn't obvious to me that I had to sign in with Facebook to use this site. I actually tried clicking off it and using the cursor keys to move... something, anything, before I decided that signing in with Facebook must be a requirement. I am not used to sites that require me to sign in to Facebook to use them.


[f] Sign in with Facebook

closes tab


Your loss.

Using FB for SSO increases conversion rates, and takes a whole bunch of burden off app developers. It's a big win for everyone, including you, who may wish to get more cool apps per total programmer-hour in the world.


Likewise.


Frankly, that describes the whole Node Knockout this year. It was pretty disappointing.


That's kind of the whole point of the app.


Ok... but I won't log into these kind of FB-connected sites before seeing a demo of what it does and what it will do w/ my FB account & contacts. Needs a video or a sandbox or something.


It actually doesn't get anything but public info, which you can see in the permissions request page on Facebook. All it does is grab your name, profile photo and url. It doesn't even store anything in a database--it's all in-memory at the moment.


It can't do anything with your facebook account or contacts. It just gets your friends list as a list of facebook user ids, and your name and other public info.

EDIT: Despite the down votes, my statement is still perfectly true.


Awesome idea, had great fun racing other people I finally ended up talking to! Some qualms/suggestions: - Text wrapping doesn't work properly, the text box doesn't resize with larger messages, the text just gets cut off. - If you miss a message, i.e. someone says something after the message, there is no way of looking at what they said. Some sort of history would be cool. (Maybe scroll out a list when you click on the user?) - It would be cool if you could hold down the arrow keys to move, right now the movement is one by one. To be fair, this does make races more fun! (not that big a bother at all, to be honest!)

Cool idea!


Sorta similar to an experiment I made a while ago [1]. I do think there's something to spatially-oriented chat, but it doesn't seem to get much traction

[1] http://openforum.samwarmuth.com/n/newmap -- You're a dot. Move using the arrow keys, type+enter to talk. You can click on stuff to build walls. (N.B. doesn't work on firefox)


I like the concept, and there's a lot of directions you can take it in if you want to keep working on it.

Our team had a similar theme (http://psyche.cc), though we focused on images instead of text.


Very similar to http://yourworldoftext.com/ , but that one was text only.

I love the concept, but I'm more inclined to Your World of Text because of the ASCII drawings and anonymity.


Hey, I made almost the exact same thing a few months ago:

http://nearish.com

Drop me an email at joe@nearish.com if you'd like to talk, I am interested in your solution to scaling.


any screenshots? i don't have a fb account and am not about to set one up to try this.


Doesn't work.


What about it doesn't work?


Application Error. Check your logs for details.


Ascii cocks, yay. >.>




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: