Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every site you're browsing. | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every site you're browsing.

chrome.google.com

51 pointsbkanber32 comments

Is it me or do I see a "add a live chat room to every website!" startup/idea every 6 months, either by apps, HTML framesets, whatever, then followed by press saying it will change the world/internet/whatever, then I never hear about it again. Perhaps nobody actually wants an anonymous chat room on every site :P

Agreed! The difference is: this isn't a startup. It was a 12-hour "learn to make Chrome Extensions" project that could end up being cool ;)

Having implemented something similar a couple years ago, (http://www.metacomments.com/), I would say you're right. People post a comment or two, then never use it again.

You're probably right. Does anyone remember Google Sidewiki? http://www.google.com/sidewiki

It's not exactly a chat, but still very similar. At the time it was seen with excitement, but I'm not sure how many people still use it. I, for example, uninstalled it after a few days.

I remember something like this from close to 10 years ago. My memory is vague, but I remember a program that offered to let me chat with other users on sites I was visiting. I also remember there was never anyone else with the program on any of the sites I visited.

That's because it's a classical chicken and egg problem - the idea is only valuable if a lot of people use it.

Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation:

If I go to Hacker news, what are the chances there'll be someone to chat with? Well, according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm there are currently around 2 billion Internet users, and if we assume that at any given point 10.000 people are on Hacker news then one out of 200.000 global users are available to chat on this site at this moment. What this means is basically that unless you have an installed base of millions there will be noone to talk to. And you won't get that base because there's noone to talk to...

It's simple math, and noone seems to do the numbers before they launch something like this.

While I agree in principle this example is bad - chances for someone to be on HN or any other techno-startup site are _much_ bigger.

_why was one of the first to implement this, in 2005. It wasn't a chat, but a comment system for hackers.

The installation instructions were intentionaly elusive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20051125122020/http://hoodwinkd.h...

The IP adresses point to DNS servers that serve two custom domains: hoodwink.d and ___._ (or you could add them to your host file? not sure...).

From there you could browse those sites that had further info, and enjoined you to install a greasemonkey script that injected the comment div in the target pages.

To add hoodwink'd comments to a site, you had to register it at hoodwink.d, with an URL regexp to recognize the site, and an xpath query to locate the point where the comment thread would be inserted.

There were also RSS feeds, that allowed to follow a commenter, or get all the updates of a given site.

Cool stuff. .

Here is some more info

A longer description: http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2006/01/hoodwinkd.html

Magnus Holm, debugging the system: http://oldblog.judofyr.net/posts/who-broke-hoodwinkd.html

A few screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbyrussell/3838274563/in/phot...

> _why was one of the first to implement this, in 2005.

FWIW, I remember quite a few startups doing this around 1999. It's a very old idea.

Hoodwink'd was a fun project. You really felt like you were sneaking around the interwebs, leaving comments and sharing links to a tiny community.

I also have a theory that many of _why's (earliest) most known projects were created because of Hoodwink'd. He needed a web framework, so he wrote Camping. He wanted to write the HTML in Ruby, so he wrote Markaby. In order to inject the hoodwinks into the web page you need a proxy, so he wrote mouseHole. And he wanted a simple way to search and replace HTML in the proxy, so he wrote Hpricot. It's all one big family…

This reminds me of the first camping announcement.

He spent perhaps half an hour, probably more, frantically adding surrealist images to the post. I imagined him excited as a kid, stuck in a creativity rut. Good memories.

Do you know how long it took him to write Camping?

I think http://zesty.ca/crit/ was the first (1997, also comments instead of chat). It took a less playful approach.

This always seems like such a good idea to me. Like walking around a busy city bustling with people all around.

But then I realize I would never use it. The idea of broadcasting my browsing habits page by page to a third party is creepy beyond belief.

That's exactly why SiteChat is anonymous and doesn't save _anything_ on the server! :)

While I give the author the benefit of the doubt he or she has every intent to respect privacy, if I really care about my own privacy I should do what I can to protect it myself before I place my trust in a third party.

It's like revealing my own secret to someone and telling them not to tell anyone else. I have the most to lose if my secret is revealed. If that isn't enough for me to keep it to myself what is preventing anyone else from revealing it?

Because I don't care to let people follow my browsing behavior site by site, I had better not broadcast it to begin with.

EDIT: I should add, I do have some initial doubts about the anonymity guarantees in this extension. Is all traffic encrypted? Can I be sure nothing is getting unintentionally logged by say a forgotten debug statement or server request logs? I've seen credit card numbers turn up in Apache access logs. Is my IP actually obscured from others or is it merely my name? Even Tor is hesitant to guarantee anonymity.

If a large % of Facebook users used this, it would quickly become unusable on the site.

Any ideas about handling large usage - separate people out into smaller manageable groups by IP/geo/other?

At present, if a large % of my apartment building used this, it would quickly trash my server ;).

My intention is to just see how things develop, and if I need to upgrade servers and write some more intelligent routing, then I absolutely will. :)

Sweet app man!

I once tried to convince my employer to let me do something like this via a Java applet in the banner ads we were running (yes, banner ads can include applets). The idea was that all the people seeing our ad could chat among themselves, and the hope was the would be unusual enough to get people to actually notice the ad.

Sadly, they wouldn't let me try it.

If people start using it, it could have very interesting social implications. Live communities can form for different sites--facebook, reddit, HN, youtube--and each community would be interesting to observe.

Really cool, I've been waiting for something like this to come along and be executed right so that it will pick up traction. We'll see if this is the one...

Maybe you should take a look at SideSpeech (http://www.sidespeech.com)

I'm curious about the privacy issues around this. Can your chats (and browsing info) be traced back to you?

Where are the comments hosted? How long are they kept? Are they censored or moderated? Are there rules?

Comments are not hosted, they're passed through a relay server and immediately discarded. There's no censorship or moderation, other than stripping out HTML tags. No rules whatsoever.

Oh, so you don't see comments that were made before you get to the site.

Correct, you only start listening once you get there. This is intended to be more of a flash-mob style application, rather than a reliable communication application

I bet the chat on HN could be interesting.. Not sure about most other sites, though.

Probably also on sites linked from HN.

no need for GCaht, gacebook chat etc..now..wow..this is cool!!

You guys should have a look at sidespeech.com

Tweet size this shit for spam prevention pleaaaase!

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