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Comment by TrevorJ | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, I'd love a chat app that sends each character as it is typed, simply for the pure chaos of it.

I loved this in Google Wave! It felt closer to an IRL conversation, because I could start thinking about my response while the other person was typing.

I can understand why it made people uncomfortable—there was a certain intimacy to it. But, conversations are often healthier when the participants are forced to be a bit vulnerable.

Google Wave ftw

I really did like Google Wave and I'd love to see someone try the concept again, but it did have problems. Among other things, it really was quite buggy. Early on, this was understandable: they launched the product at a very early stage, which IMO is fine as long as you warn users what they're getting into. But as I recall, it never really stopped being buggy.

They gave up on the prototype and added the live collaboration features to Google Docs instead. They left the mixed chat component behind pretty badly but they did build a good concurrently edited word processor. Does anyone else remember sending docx files around by email for revisions in Track Changes mode?

Didn't live collaboration in Google Docs predate Google Wave?

The nice thing about Google Wave (other than the instant typing) was how you could seamlessly move between talking and collaborating.

I think it did, but I also remember it being a lot more janky than it was after Wave. My recollection is that they reimplemented it with what they learned from Wave. I might be mistaken though, no sources sorry.

I think wave for the most part has been realized in products like Notion and the upcoming Microsoft Loop

Notion has some good ideas but to me it's no Wave! Wave, to me, just felt very seamless and free-form/flexible, in terms of how you could go from chatting to planning to collaborative writing and editing.

Haven't tried or seen much of Microsoft Loop.

Yes! Wave was a genuine attempt to move the public on from wikis, word processors, and other entrenched modes of interaction to something completely fresh.

Try talk[1] some time -- it's a live connection to the other user's TTY, so they see everything you type, typos and all. You can't even type simultaneously, since the messages would intermingle; you need to wait for the other person to signal that they're finished.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

One of the last interactions I had with a good friend of mine was in a talk session, he was showing it to me and then it went on for a while.

We were very young men, and he was coaching me in some situation with a girl.

He died soon after of CF. RIP nion

I always preferred ytalk, then your own window to type in. (The screen was split in an upper and lower half and you had one or the other.)

I believe ntalk has 2-way split windows as well. I think that's what I have installed on my Linux server, and a couple of my friends have accounts there too.

Ntalk is my second favorite way of communicating after in-person face-to-face talking.

i used ytalk to talk to my grandmother in the '00s. i would log in to her computer from the other side of the planet and start a session to see if she was on the computer. and then we'd chat.

https://brutal.chat/

Thanks for sharing this :) Just spend a good 15 minutes on it talking to strangers. It removes all barriers I normally experience for communicating online, encouraging more natural discussion

I was there and it was amazing. After comparing this comment above with your typing there, and this comment here compared to my typing there, I concur.

/MagPie

It isn’t work and it isn’t a divisive twitter or reddit discussion. That probably helps!

Most underrated comment in this thread.

This is how it was for a lot of "SysOp chat" systems in the BBS days. Sometimes the two parties wren't even in separate sections of the chat, they were effectively just having a discussion in a shared text document.

Traditional unix talk. Who needs chat apps, when everybody can just ssh to a shared server and chat using 'talk'.

I remember doing that with modem connections in dos, you could chat with a friend while up/downloading (or with a bbs sysop). There was even a sequence that beeped on the other side to draw peer’s attention, but I’ve never used it. With friends we had a rule to not interrupt the one who writes until a newline, because characters would mix as in “Hi, how aHrie you”.

It was fun seeing the "take turns on double newlines" rule occasionally broken for normal conversational interrupts, like their HAHAHA's interleaving with your message to let you know they're already laughing along, or OOOOOH to let you know you can stop explaining something because they just got it, or waitwaitwait to get you to go back and expound on an earlier point before you continue.

Live chat agents can see what you are typing before pressing enter. You can’t see their typing of course.

This is such a violation of trust and user expectations IMO. Users have built up an expectation that the result can not be seen until you send. I understand that it likely speeds up support, but there should be some message at the start warning you of this like they have when your call is recorded.

This was a thing in ICQ back in the day, you could see what the person was typing real-time as they typed it.

see https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0301.html

This is that feature in xmpp, but it didn't send as you typed, it batched up typing and sent just one packet a second (or so) with timed keystrokes in the packet so it could play back a simulation of you typing; thus giving the illusion of live typing while not swamping the network.

There's some demo gifs over on https://www.realjabber.org/ (the more recent website had flash demos only and has since been shut down...this is all a bit delapidated)

> so it could play back a simulation of you typing; thus giving the illusion of live typing while not swamping the network.

IMO, this completely defeats the point.

The advantage of live typing is that I can see what someone is typing sooner, before they're even done, and start considering my response. I want to see their message, or partial message, as soon as possible.

I don't want to see some movie of all of their keystrokes and corrections. It's totally fine if it comes with the territory, but only in the name of reducing latency.

That isn't to say I'm against batching the keystrokes to conserve bandwidth, but don't fake it!

Did you watch the demo? https://www.realjabber.org/anim/real_time_text_demo.html You ARE seeing it before they are done (compare to the left hand window, which what most chat apps do now), the delay in seeing live typing is at most one second, and the experience of watching the batched messages without the timing information (the middle window) is painful.

Ah—no, I hadn't seen the demo.

What isn't clear to me from the demo, however, is what happens if the typist uses backspace or pauses while typing. I wouldn't want those things to get transmitted if they happened within the span of a single transmission.

In other words, it's okay to display letter-by-letter, similar to video game dialog, but they don't need to keep the original timing information.

Here you go: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/honk/id1458452703

ICQ had a mode that did this (in the '90s). It was awesome!

I've found https://honk.me to be great fun.

ICQ had this mode too.

See google docs

Google Docs isn't really made for conversations though. You can use it that way, but it can become confusing quickly, for reasons unrelated to instant typing. (For example, it's difficult to remember who said what unless you agree on some coding system.)

Once upon a time... ICQ.

Google Wave

Google Docs

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