Hello gang- thanks for the comments, constructive and otherwise.
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“I think the Leopard version of iChat crushes this idea.”
Not even remotely, unless you’ve seen something we haven’t. Where the file sharing? The shared space? The bandwidth aggregation?
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“This is yet another demonstration of why Internet infrastructure and protocols should be base on open standards. Email is based on old, generally horrid protocols and standards, but at least they’re all open. That’s why we have email today with rich text, images, video, file attachments, encryption, and so on. If the IM world wasn’t crippled by Soviet-style central planning, we’d be on the 50th iteration of the Chatboard idea already.”
But we’re not on the 50th iteration, are we? Somebody HAS to step up to the plate. There’s no reason that this problem can’t be approached in a bittorrent-esque tracker methodology. THEN the problem would be fixed without massive server farms, and without help from fortune-500 companies that do what they will and make us deal with the issues.
The contest is mydreamapp. This is it. You need it, you all need it, and when you start using it, you won’t know what you did without it. It’s like the iPod. I initially said “5 gig? What for? I’ve got CDs to use in the car.” Then I bought one of the 5 giggers. Never looked back, but I had to USE it to see that CDs weren’t the best solution, and the iPod was done well.
How many of you now want to give up your MP3 players?
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“A major roadblock might be bandwidth between participants.”
Agreed, that’s why p2p is the way to deal with that. Every little bit helps, and everyone sharing what they have helps everyone. This is what makes bittorrent 50% of the world’s bandwitdh- it’s EVERYONE sending and receiving.
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“Chatboard as a peer-to-peer file sharing space is very interesting and should work but doing a shared workspace where you can literally work on the shared resouces (i.e. editing them together) is much more harder.”
And…
“Chatboad could do it right. But as it is with most networking apps the people you work with also need it otherwise it doesn’t make sense for you. Marketability could be Chatboard’s number one issue.”
Marketability is the number one issue. Cheap, and cross-platform is the way to go on this. Version 1 doesn’t need editability so much as it needs seamless IM file transfer, which makes it cheap, and makes it as ubiquitous as possible.
