Posted by zxwcig7u on June 12, 1998, at 10:51:27
In reply to Welcome!, posted by Dr. Bob on June 10, 1998, at 3:18:32
> Hello, and welcome to this new project.
> Give it a try, and let me know what you think.> Bob
I am going to give this a try.
I can make a suggestion, although I'm not clear
how easy it will be to implement, as the commercial
enterprise that I'll refer to has been purchased by
AOL and may not be able to provide the service I
recommend, at least for free as they have been.Ideally you'd like people who are logged on doing
other things to be alerted when a chat-opportunity
develops that might interest the user.
Meaningful chat interactions are "ephemeral".Ideally if I'm online and someone is talking about
a topic that interests me, possibly even using
keywords I have selected, I'd like to know about
it so I can join the chat, or at least see if
the discussion is one in which I'd like to participate.A group of Israeli software engineers recognized
this a few years ago and developed a product known
as ICQ - the WSJ recently reported that they were
in negotiations to sell ICQ for $300M - a nice turn
if it goes through.In principle you could develop a "profile" page
that would permit me to identify keywords,
topics, even partipants, so that I would be notified
in realtime whenever a chat opportunity comes
up. ICQ permits this now, and has been doing
so for free, with a lot of control and flexibility
- making things public, private, etc. I don't
don't believe their system has evolved to the
point where keywords in a chat will trigger
notificaton, but that's as they say a reasonably
quick hack.I also know of at least one development group that
has put together an ICQ like system for use in
a commercial application, so I suspect that there's
at least a chance that ICQ's not protected that
you couldn't develop something like this.Good luck. I'll monitor groups when I have time,
but it's tough to get these things off the ground
without a notification ...Love to know what you think of this. I'm the
same person that sent you e-mail re the Lucent
proxy server, and you can reply at the above
address.
poster:zxwcig7u
thread:1
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19981001/msgs/4.html