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Comment by AshleysBrain | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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