Ask HN: Embedded Chat in Website?

1 pointishener2 comments

Recently someone proposed the idea of embedding a chat room on our website for users to chat between themselves (it's a community-type site). I was wondering why don't we see more sites having chat between users? Isn't it something that can make users stay on your site loner, and engage more? Do es that idea have any chance of success?

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Are you looking for a SAAS solution to spin out quick? You'd need to roll it out to see if it did keep people around and then need to keep watching your numbers as the community grew. Eventually as you get a large user base you get issues with how many people are in one "chat", moderation of offensive content, how the experience itself scales, etc. which is why larger sites may not do it (or they never found value in it)

If you're doing the startup thing though, just roll it out and see if it helps you get to a better place and keep evaluating if it's core and worth it to maintain. GoInstant has turned into Platform as a service which could maybe handle the real time component.

You might want to check out: https://togetherjs.com/

For a community site, it sounds like a decent idea in general. Why don't we see more? I think it is only recently that some easier ways to do it came about.

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