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
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.
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/
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.
Yes, I remember it too, but can't think of the name or what searches might help track it down. Might've started with a C or S? Tried searching for things like: 'overlay block', etc.
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.)
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.
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?".
15 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] thread_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.
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
Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Edit: @aheilbut got it - ThirdVoice.
Before that, Ka-Ping Yee made CritLink: http://zesty.ca/crit/
this screenshot of it takes me back 12 years, woah: http://www.forest.impress.co.jp/article/1999/06/17/gooey.gif
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.)
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.
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.