| At first, my thoughts were wow, that's simple and potentially really powerful. Then I opened it up.. and even on HN, the chat was a hard to follow trail of throw away comments. Chat is simply an extremely hard thing to moderate and present cleanly. Comments work, because most of the time, insightful/helpful comments are voted to the top. The way I see it is that chat is useful in a number of scenarios but I'm not sure this is it. I would suggest it's much more useful when: 1) You know the other people in the room, and it's not anonymous. If facebook were behind this, it may be useful, but the probability of someone you know browsing the same page as you is slim. It could work if it used 2 or 3 degrees of seperation however. 2) Liveness is key. Take olark for example, live and direct chat to customer service is extrmely useful. Alternatively, if you are covering a live event, it's much better to have live chat. Even if it's hard to follow at times, at least you know everything is current. Excellent use of a bookmarklet, and thanks for sharing, but it's going to be very difficult to make it usable. |