A Random Chat applet hit digg recently. It allows you to chat with a random stranger visiting the website at the same time as you.
It’s a good idea, but it would really be much better to have something similar based on Jabber (and maybe it could become a Jabber killer app’ ?)
Some thoughts:
- It should be easy to get in the system, but slightly more difficult to get out of it : the main problem with the current website-based system is that it doesn’t work very well outside of flash-crowd periods. For example, you could be considered available for Random Chat as soon as you are “Available” or “Free for chat” on Jabber.
- The system should provide strong anonymity (no direct messages between participating users to hide their JID) and allow for blacklisting to avoid the usual harassment problems.
- The system should work with a classic Jabber client: no specific software or support for unimplemented JEPs should be required.
- The system could include a tag-based system to be able to chat with people with similar interests or speaking the same language(s)
So, is somebody interested in working on this ? It would be quite easy to do with XMPP4R or another Ruby library. (This was from my list of things that I would really like to see implemented, but I won’t have time to work on it myself)
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