Show HN: FlyByChat, the site I'm working on. Looking for feedback. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: FlyByChat, the site I'm working on. Looking for feedback.

beta.flybychat.com

13 pointsbdr22 comments

I'd suggest making a single, clear call to action. Perhaps "Chat anonymously with a random partner" would be the best option to drive attention to first, since it requires the least effort and commitment from the user. I'd make the button say something like "Start a Chat Now!", with smaller subtext to the effect of "100% Anonymous and Fun".

Good feedback. I was worried about that. Thanks.

You should tell people that the global chat room isn't anonymous, and that their facebook profile will be linked in the chat room. It's always bad when users have to find out from other users that they aren't anonymous.

- UI is nice. Excellent idea. Was able to quickly use the site and chat with two people.

- The space to say something is small. - Can improve on giving more visual feedback - First panel should be anonymous chat - Easy way to enter your anonymous profile - There was a javascript alert window that pop up (maybe debug message or something) - .. Unable to connect.. - .. Down for maintenance ... - The icon to add more panel should be more clear. It sort of surprise me. - Ability to maximize a panel (I suppose I can delete the other panels)

Thanks. Yeah, it was down for maintenance for a few minutes there.

I'd like to see when my chat partner is actually active (like in typing) and stuff or update the title bar of the window.

also an option to enlarge the chat window would be nice.

When you say enlarge, are you thinking of resizing the windows horizontally?

To me (Safari 5/Mac) this site is a big blue screen with no content except an "About" link that doesn't work. I waited five to ten seconds before giving up.

I'm using a 3G connection which may be flaky, so maybe I'm just suffering from extreme latency. Nevertheless, you should probably try to show at least a sentence on initial page load to keep me curious enough to suffer through another few seconds...

Yeah, the site works on Safari 5, so it must be latency. In particular, sometimes the external Facebook JS takes a long time to load. I'll add a loading message. Thanks!

Nice idea, but it hangs on "finding partner", which kind of sucks (I closed the window after about 30 secs)

I think the hanging is probably that there was no one else looking. You don't have cookies disabled, do you?

Might be a good idea to let the user know that's the case so that they don't mistake it with hanging.

Submitter here. Thanks for checking out my site. I'm looking for feedback on all levels: the UI and implementation, the product idea, and the market.

Particular questions: do you "know what to do" when you get to the site? Is it ugly? What would make you use a site like this?

The idea here is to iterate in the same space as ChatRoulette, towards the goal of becoming the best place to meet new people online. There are some obvious directions to go in, like adding video, dating features (FB' Interested In/Looking For), and locale support, and maybe some not so obvious ones, but I'd like to hear what you think.

I just wanted to note that this is the first hit on google for flybychat, so you might want to update it with a little current info at some point.

isn't omegle anonymous chat too?

? Yes, Omegle supports anonymous chat.

On chrome, it looks a little strange. The chat window is all compressed into one line.

http://imgur.com/ldNpV

It doesn't do that on mine. :|

What OS + version of Chrome are you using? What happens if you resize the browser window?

Thanks for taking the time to get a screenshot, I appreciate that.

The ui is very nice, I really like the ability to add more chat windows side by side. The obvious problem is that there don't seem to be very many people online.

Thank you. This post is the first place I've announced the site, so it makes sense that there aren't a lot of people on. I think I'll try to get some more now.

Nice - the location features are something I definitely wanted while messing around on Chatroulette and Omegle.

Looks great, the site. Would add sound notification on message arrival (optional).

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