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.
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!
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.
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 :)
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.
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);
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.
You can't do that. Though it seems like the sites are composed, they are in fact just embedded viewports (iframe). The only way to scrape username, at the moment, is to turn that app into a plugin/bookmarklet, or at least bootstrap from one.
EDIT: Or API/embedded script, but that of course requires the cooperation of site's owner.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadIt seems slow, like it's built using AJAX/PHP/MySQL. What stack powers this thing?
Good job guys, I quite like the implementation, I hope to use it myself actually.
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!
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.
Props to you for finding/hiring him.
http://i.imgur.com/VpTFE.png
not enough room to see all of the text.
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.
p.s.: no promises it wont explode ;)Seems like a fairly standard node thing to do!
Follow us on twitter too for updates on our upcoming developer tools launch. We're http://www.twitter.com/getenvolved
Using jQuery, this should be trivial:
$(".pagetop").children('a[href*="user?id="]').attr("href").split('=')[1];
EDIT: Or API/embedded script, but that of course requires the cooperation of site's owner.
This would require injecting javascript on to news.ycombinator.com. It wouldn't be so bad, but it would require user interaction to do that. If it requires user interaction then it'll be less used.
Granted, they could make an extension which does that -- but now you have to download something just to use chat. That's a big barrier to entry.
Edit: Holy S$^, Holy S*$^.
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