Show HN: Also Viewing – “Sally is also viewing this page” as a service
alsoviewing.com
alsoviewing.com
The first thing I though "oh again someone trying to solve the same problem". I remember from CVS locks up to CRM messages saying "the user X is editing this document, See draft [here]".
The second though... for just a small feature like this one I would never pay $24/month ... especially when I build my own CRM/system. However one single payment for a feature with no upgrade possibility could be acceptable (especially if it is cheaper than my development time AND it integrates good with my system).
EDIT: please note I do not pretend to be "destructive", just as I said, I wanted to give feedback.
I certainly don't understand my potentials customers as well as I should. Are you part of a company or just you? Is your CRM software just used by a few people.
One-off payment is an interesting model, but hard make work with services. Though I think it works wonderfully with products like Arq (https://www.arqbackup.com/). How much would you be willing pay as a one-time fee?
Looking at what it says on your website, it's clearer: what you really care about is if Sally is also editing, not viewing. That does solve a problem (short of having proper version control; non-programmers aren't going to learn to use Git).
So the terminology needs to be fixed. But does it actually show editing, not viewing?
Though I guess this is really just about the default text. It's very easy to customize the banners to say "Sally is also editing this page.".
Tickets is our core feature. And we indeed have the requirement to show that 'Someone is also viewing this ticket'.
But the more important feature we need is to sync changes to a ticket across users. For example, if user X re-assignes the ticket to user Y, people who are viewing this ticket should be able to see the change without refreshing.
Knowing someone else is also viewing a ticket is not particularly useful for a ticketing system, because even if I know a ticket is viewing by others, I still need to do what I'm supposed to do (reply, re-assign or whatever).
I guess Also Viewing is great for websites where users feel comfortable doing something with others, and they don't make much changes to the UI. For instance, watching videos or listening to music with friends.
By the way, I personally know Paul (the author) and I wish Also Viewing could become popular.
I think you pose an interesting question. Also Viewing adds very simple feature and many sites choose implement it themselves.
I think it makes sense as a service because adding this feature usually requires setting up another server to handle the real-time connections. If you're building another Google Docs then the real-time communication is your core competancy, but if you're building a line of business CRUD Rails/Java/PHP app, then it's much simpler to add two lines of code and not worry about maintaining the additional infrastructure.