[Show HN] An experiment - Group Chat from just a URL

[jmathai]

Looks great. I've seen similar projects and I think these disposable group chats are very powerful.

My biggest problem is that I never remember them for when I need them and resort to group chats. Often that's "good enough" but for when everyone isn't on the same network something like this would be nice. Again, the hardest part is thinking about the service when I need it.

A feature request would be file attachments. It's 2013 and attaching a file in a chat is still extremely painful and rarely works.

[ad93611]

Gee, thanks! We were thinking that we'd allow other websites to take a url and embed it within their site or collaborative area. Do you think that will help?

Yeah, I hear you about file attachments :)

[charliesome]

> "Profanity detected. Message cannot be sent"

Seriously?

[ad93611]

Yeah, there is a simple trie that checks for common profanity words. I'm sure we can improve it. :)

[hardik988]

What do you mean by "may exist"?

     Failed! "asdjoiqndiqnw09d21eh09n20dnqdqddqw" may exist, try another name 

Are you using a bloom filter or something?

[netrus]

My guess would be they spread random false positives for privacy reasons?

[eksith]

Same here. For a moment, I thought my imagination was insufficient. Then I remembered I tied my imagination to /dev/random

[lambda]

Or a hash with not enough bits to avoid collisions, and no chaining.

[racbart]

  Failed! "sdf" may exist, try another name
  Failed! "sdkjfhjkshf" may exist, try another name
  Failed! "kjht7y248i23uh" may exist, try another name

Great minds think alike, right? (edit: formatting)

[lancefisher]

  > Failed! "test" may exist, try another name
  > Failed! "another name" may exist, try another name
  > Failed! "i just did" may exist, try another name

[Hortinstein]

but apparently touchme wasn't taken!

[jameskennemore]

http://groups.gaglers.com/r/EM3m/

[gizzlon]

Choosing 'Ø' as my name made the whole thing go blank.. removing the cookies and choosing another name made it work again..

Edit: Great idea btw :)

[lambda]

> Failed! "sodihfoihvocin" may exist, try another name

Hmm. Every name I tried gave me this message. At first I thought it was because I used obvious names that other people had used, like "test" and "foobar", but even the above random string of gibberish failed.

[ryandvm]

Kudos. Very clean design. I toyed with pretty much the exact same concept a few years ago when I wanted to try out Google's AppEngine:

http://yakeze.appspot.com/nick/hackernews2013/

[crucio]

If you're going to give people a unique URL to give out, then can we have non unique group names? I couldn't find a relevant group name that wasn't already taken, so resorted to mashing the keyboard

[malditogeek]

Interesting. I've been working on a very similar concept but based on IRC. There's a version running here: http://lalo-g7stltno.dotcloud.com/

Once authenticated with your Twitter account you can join a room using the URL, the path represents a room/channel. The cool thing is that you can also join to that channel using a standard IRC client as well.

The code is here: https://github.com/malditogeek/lalo

[pyxy]

When me and a friend of mine were experimenting in creating a web chat we realized that inserting new messages into the beginning of page (or div) is much better for both users and developers. No bothering with autoscrolling. No user distraction of autoscrolling when he reads previous messages. It was really a good decision.

Anyway IRC is much better. I don't want to live my life in a multitabbed web browser window.

[ad93611]

Good idea! thanks.

[mtrimpe]

I'd also make the identifiers non-guessable.

I'm having quite a nice conversation with kokpo at the moment but I don't think he meant to invite me ;)

[p4bl0]

Whatever I try to use as group name, "it may already exist":

“Failed! "almzirfmzeurfuerzf" may exist, try another name”

“Failed! "lalalalalalalahello" may exist, try another name”

…

[shanelja]

Same issue:

Failed! "this name is clearly not in use due to the random string of characters it ended with ~agsh1das82S~" may exist, try another name

Perhaps the system is overloaded, or they use a dynamically generated unique identifier with each room, such as a short URL of 3-6 characters, if they're numeric only HN and Reddit could probably fill it pretty quickly - but without any more information, this is all guess work.

[thejosh]

Keep getting:

Failed! "rexasdsfed" may exist, try another name

[MichaelApproved]

I was surprised by what names were already taken. Seemed like there was a bug in the name check rather than the name actually being taken.

[ad93611]

this is a bug! We are looking into it

[spiritplumber]

I'd like to be able to use this for my telepresence rig. Please let me know if I can license this.

[ad93611]

Let us talk. Can you send me a email? My email is in profile.

[guynamedloren]

I tried 5 random names (each more complex and more unique than the last) and each one failed...

[polack]

Tried to create groups with non-us character in it (ö) and get the following message:

Page unavailable Sorry, but the requested page is unavailable due to a server hiccup. Our engineers have been notified, so check back later.

[Hortinstein]

this is cool, any possibility of the source showing up on github?

[glomph]

https://crypto.cat/ will give you encrypted group chat from a word. But you do have to install an extension.