I'm curious about the privacy issues around this. Can your chats (and browsing info) be traced back to you?
Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every site you're browsing.
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Re: Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every site you're browsing.
#32Is 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
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.
Re: Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every site you're browsing.
#33_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…
I think http://zesty.ca/crit/ was the first (1997, also comments instead of chat). It took a less playful approach.
Re: Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every site you're browsing.
#34Is 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
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 ne…
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.