Incorporating chat into web browsing?

September 24, 2005 8:37 PM

Incorporating chat into web browsing?

I read about Flock, this new social web browser in closed beta that talks about making browsing more of a group experience by incorporating del.icio.us, technorati and flickr. Im wondering about incorporating chat. That seems much more social to me. Like have a chat room in the browser for every web page or something. So you can discuss with people at the same page about whats on there. Seems useful to me. I understand that people will bring up possible abuse issues. But what Im wondering is whether this is possible, and whether the abuse issues can be overcome/good outweighing bad. And could someone please make this browser? I dont think the Flock people have this in mind.

posted by GleepGlop to computers & internet (9 comments total)

See here.
posted by qwip at 8:57 PM on September 24, 2005

I think you missed the idea, qwip.
posted by GleepGlop at 9:06 PM on September 24, 2005

Actually I remember seeing somewhere a site that created discussion forums for sites that didnt provide their own, like boingboing for example. Ill try to find it...
posted by GleepGlop at 9:20 PM on September 24, 2005

I remember seeing an application that provided this functionality. The problem was, it only worked with other people using that same software and were on the same web site. Your idea would only be truly successful if it was integrated directly into the browser. There has been lots of talk since of making 3rd party programs or making browsers that would allow people to annotate and leave notes on web sites, etc. So it is possible, just not mainstream.
posted by banished at 9:39 PM on September 24, 2005

Normal HTTP connections are typically not persistent, so there isn't a way to determine who's looking at a page, just who has recently. When they are persistent, it's not acceptable behavior for a server to send a list of connections for security and privacy reasons.

The only way I can think to do this is if the organization developing the browser sets up a centralized database of what pages all of its clients are looking at. The security and privacy concerns are still there, but at least the client can tell exactly what page everyone is on. This option is begging to be hijacked by a spam script ("I'M LOOKING AT GOOGLE.COM I'M SAYING 'VISIT XXXVIAGRAPOKER.COM!' I'M LOOKING AT GOOGLE.COM I'M SAYING 'VISIT XXXVIAGRAPOKER.COM!'"), and if it saw any widespread use it would almost certainly be exploited into unusability.
posted by moift at 10:22 PM on September 24, 2005

The classic example is the much-heralded but ultimately unloved Third Voice. It didn't permit annotation of the web so much as anonymous graffitti all over your favorite web page. Instead of insightful criticism such as "this sentence is misleading, see NYTimes article" you got "you suck!"

There are also numerous unrelated tandem browsing experiments. Everybody always thinks this would be great, but I've never seen it be anything mroe than a toy in practice.
posted by dhartung at 11:05 PM on September 24, 2005

I think moift's idea has the most potential, for the reasons given.

I wonder if this might work well as a Firefox extension. If server overhead would be too much, maybe the extension can give the AIM/MSN/Yahoo/GoogleTalk screennames of people on the page (as voluntarily reported by the user), or auto-generate a chatroom using one of those programs, or something like that.

Maybe someone with more XUL programming knowledge than I can comment on the feasibility of such a structure.
posted by SuperNova at 11:25 PM on September 24, 2005

I think you missed the idea, qwip.

Sorry I misunderstood. I still don't think I get what you want. Is it possible? Yes - see the link. Is it a good idea? Yes and no. The good is that you can interact in real time. The bad is spam, a dialog like on IRC chatroom, and the potential that it becomes an annoying distraction.

You want someone to make the browser, but you don't seem to have a compelling reason other than it seems like a good idea. I think the best approach is to determine first how people would like to interact and about what and then design to that. It might be incorporated chat, but it might not. If you really want to help your Flock friends, you should noodle on some ideas that would answer the actual design question. What are you trying to accomplish with social web browsing?

From my perspective, I really would rather just have a historic dialog (much like ask.mefi) so that I don't need to be online and active to see what people have to say about something. Having a chat would be OK, but there are a lot of other ways I'd prefer to communicate than live chat. That's just me.

I think it would be more interesting to be able to follow someone's bread crumbs as they explore the web. Say you find someone who you find interesting and want to see where they are investigating - you'd be able to drop "crumbs" as you search and have anyone else be able to come along on the journey. The person dropping could click a button at any point on any page to anchor it and create a surfing experience. Kinda like hyperlinking, but much more casual and extremely easy to place and access. Just an idea.
posted by qwip at 1:43 AM on September 25, 2005

I remember ICQ produced an app that did this, a long time ago. You could chat with other people browsing the same page as you, as long as they also ran the same program. It was a beta, and I guess it was discontinued because I can't find it anymore. Don't remember what it was called.

The problem with this app was that it didn't have enough users. This was back in the days when altavista was the preferred search engine, and even when looking at altavista.com you only rarely saw that anyone else was browsing it. A quick google search tells me about another discontinued project named "Howdy" that did the same thing. And it looks like the instant messenger Odigo can do it.

It would be cool if someone would make something like this work, but I think it would have to be incorporated into some already well-established software if it is ever going to catch on. A firefox plug-in maybe?
posted by cheerleaders_to_your_funeral at 10:12 AM on September 25, 2005