Chat at a location
I’ve spoken before about being able to chat with people that are viewing the same web page as you. You may be on the front page of TechMeme and decide to launch a URL chat service like Gabbly to be able to chat to other people on the same page who also use Gabbly. For this to work there has to be lots of Gabbly users, otherwise the odds are going to be slim that someone on the same page uses Gabbly.
Other URL chat tools like Gabbly are, Yaplet, Chatsum, OthersOnline, Weblin, yakalike, dai.sy, Itzle, Zpeech (also acts as a asynchronous discussion board)…
Now what would be good is a meta-URL chat tool, just like what Meebo, ebuddy and others do for IM.
This way when you launch your URL chat tool you have several services (communities) that may be available for a chat.
Serendipity is not the only way to use URL chat, you can speak to a friend earlier in the day and decide to meet at a URL at a certain time for a chat.
Rather than plan a chat it would be even easier if you could go to the Gabbly website, click on your friends profile, and be able to see what website they are on now, then click and join.
This is exactly what you can do on me.dium, this tool is a little different, it’s a browser add on, and it’s more than chat, you can actually co-browse the web with others, ie. you can move around the web together chatting, just like walking in the park, in the street, in the house, etc…
me.dium also recommends webpages for you to browse, based on how similar your activity is to other users, for more check out their FAQ.
If your friends or strangers are not exciting enough to chat with and co-browse they have special sessions called RockMe where at an organised time you can jump in and join a musician on the web, chat and browse with them…I’m sure they will be going to lots of music sites to listen to music and watch video’s, so grab a beer. They schedule lots of other events as well.
medi.um have a widget for your blog so you can see who’s visited your site, and enable you and your site visitors to check out the sites that other Me.dium users are visiting.
I mentioned the other day why don’t MyBlogLog add chatting to the Recent Readers widget, so many bloggers have got this widget, why not be able to talk to each other. 3bubbles was trying to achieve this at the post level, but what I’m thinking is that you visit a blog post and the Recent Readers widget tells you who is on that blog, not just the post page. So you get a list of people like on the widget, but it tells you which post they are on, and you can chat with them even if you are not on the exact post.
What about chatting to friends that are watching the same TV channel or program as you on the web, this is exactly what you can do with Joost and Meebo. If you are watching a program on Joost, you and your friends can join the meebo room to chat about the program as your are watching it.
Another chat tool Userplane has teamed up with some online TV channels to provide the same functionality, I like how mashable put it:
” Do you ever chat on the phone with your friend while you both watch your favorite program? That’s kind of old school, because now you can chat online.”
Next we need this kind of activity on our regular TV sets, maybe a social network with your friends via a set top box…doesn’t Xbox do this sort of thing.
Imagine this on regular TV, I could chat to my mum if we are watching the same show, maybe I could even interact with the TV show as well for features like voting, or polling people at home…hang on, TV shows aren’t going to give up the money they make from SMS.
ADDED: you can also chat to others watching the same streamed internet TV event as you…see Operator 11, mogulus, blogTV, ustream, justin.tv, etc…
For location aware chat services see here.
[ADDED 7/12/07: See comment below about Others Online, this is not URL chatting, but rather matching people online on-the-fly with current interests
eg. if one person is reading a blog post about “IBM” and another is actually at the IBM website, then that is a match and these people will be visible to each other to chat. This is a more distributed version of Chat ‘N Search]
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Thank you for the great coverage of Me.dium. You pretty well nailed what we’re up to. We believe that everything is more fun when your friends are around so why should being online be any different?
Anyhow, we’re always looking for ideas and feedback and we’d love to hear your thoughts. You can drop us suggestions at our Get Satisfaction site (http://getsatisfaction.com/medium) or friend me in Me.dium if you’d like.
Thanks again.
Brent
Me.dium ID: brentd
Comment by brent — December 6, 2007 @ 4:31 pm
Hi John, Jordan here from Others Online. Thank you for the mention!
I would like to point out that Others Online isn’t doing URL-based matching at all, for the reasons you point out. We’re using semantic-driven matching so that users see each other across Web sites based on what the page is about.
Quick example/explanation: Let’s say I’m checking ski conditions at Breckenridge. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve just googled “ski conditions, breckenridge”, are at the Breckenridge web site, or reading a related blog post — we figure out what you care about and show you people relevant to “ski conditions, breckenridge, skiing, etc.”. They could be on the same site, or any other site about ski conditions at Breckenridge, or simply recently blogged about it. And we do favor showing people who are online now (to chat with, if you wish).
Unlike me.dium, we don’t display what page/URL anyone is on — just the things you have in common (activities, topics, people, interests, etc.).
Comment by Jordan Mitchell — December 6, 2007 @ 10:25 pm
Jordan,
What a great idea…
URL chatting is helpful as people on the same page can exchange insights about their current activity (explaining, understanding), what better than ask a person a question who is on the same website as you.
You interest matching basically achieves the same thing, but across websites, you are bringing people together, based on what they are doing right now…that’s amazing.
This is something Cha Cha should of got into, being a presence on the web to assist people from where they currently are.
Once you register, whenever you browse their would be a Cha Cha overlay or toolbar, any time you want to ask a question there would be someone to ask.
Right now they are only offering help at stage one, from their website, whereas they could be on all websites ready to answer questions
Comment by Johnt — December 7, 2007 @ 1:04 am
At http://www.virtual-presence.org/systems.html is a list of “Chat at a location” systems, aka “Virtual Presence” systems.
Comment by Heiner Wolf — December 10, 2007 @ 2:23 pm