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Chatsum

Reporting on the Royal College of Art Show 2006. Read more on Pixelsumo.

One of the best projects to come out of Interaction Design this year is Chatsum, the brainchild of George Grinsted in collaboration with Lee Parry.

Putting it simply, Chatsum is a web service that allows you to chat to other people who are looking at the same web page as you. You register, install a Firefox plugin and when visiting a site can read any messages left by previous visitors, or take part in a discussion with people still on the site. Rather than reading opinions on the BBC new stories on other peoples blogs for example, you can simply read what people are saying on the page you are visiting. In your user profile you can also include other web 2.0 services, such as Flickr, delici.ous, Digg, YouTube, Last.fm and Upcoming.

Although its a site with a great service and the community is sure to grow, George also states another aim for the project : “I am exploring revenue models for the post-copyright era, testing the viability of the Pro-Am production model, identifying the amount of investment needed to seed revenue using this model, exploring the intricacies of providing a Web 2.0 service and exploring the possibilities of exploiting the mass of social data that digitisation offers”.

For the RCA show, there are 3 large displays showing a visualisations of Chatsum, showing ongoing discussion as well as a world map of live locations. Visitors to the show are encouraged to log on to chatsum and visit the show website to discuss the students work.

Read about the development, a wikipedia entry and flickr images.

I doubt it will be too long before there is some corporate Yahoo style buyout :)

(also on wmmna)

Comments

• Jonathan Brodsky says:
  (June 26th 2006)
  

  a similar, although much more (intentionally) obscure product came out a while back. http://hoodwinkd.hobix.com/ does essentially the same thing, allowing people to comment on websites that don’t allow it normally. The major differences are that hoodwinkd required a high level of technical ability to get it running and it would operate inline with the site that you were browsing rather than being a seperate pane.

  There was some discussion of this project on hoodwinkd when it was first announced.

• chris says:
  (June 26th 2006)
  

  Firstly, the hoodwinkd site makes you select the text to be able to read it which is a bad start.

  The positioning of comments is a nice idea, but it does intefer with the sites layout or design. What about Flash websites? You also have to read through the html, select a css class where you would like the comment to appear and post it up. Very complicated.

  Also the good thing about Chatsum is that it’s instant, you can see which people are viewing the same site and pages as you and get involved in a discussion, without reading through html code.

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