Regular readers will remember that I recently launched a project called Chatterbloc back in February 2009 along with friends @jonguntrip, @geedee77 and @cheisaac. We launched in the early stages of development, the product functionally worked, hoping to get some more feedback from end users about where we should go with it.

Chatterbloc

Unfortunately life got in the way, Sony has kepy me busy, @jonguntrip is now there with me, and I’ve also got married along the way. Much change, and not much progress on the ‘bloc.

We’re keen to give it one last shot, to see if there’s life in the old girl yet. Feedback welcome. Some changes I made before the code freeze (no pun intended):

Comet

We initially planned on using Comet to deliver real-time chat. Comet if you don’t know, is a way to deliver data form the server to the client, without the client constantly polling the server and requesting it. A secure socket if you will, or server push technology. We initially went with the Ajax long polling option, opening up a connection to the server, and waiting for data (chat messages) to be available for sending back to the client. @geedee77 did a great job, but unfortunately, it doesn’t scale great and left open too many connections to the database.

There are other ways to implement Comet, with server side updates, but we neither had the time, or the understanding on how to do that at the time, so I stripped it out and went for a new polling method. It’s not exactly realtime, but it also intelligently stops polling when it doesn’t need to.

Sharing URLs

The other big change we had after launch was the sharing URLs functionality. One of the main features of Chatterbloc is the ability to post links in the chat window, and share it with friends in realtime. The webview window next to the chat would display the url to all users instantly. We also added some nifty things for sites like youtube which converted youtube urls to dynamic video feeds that use up the entire webview – looks awesome on high def content when sharing…

Anyway, people didn’t seem to instantly get it – We’re not convinced they still do – but we’ve made some small tweaks to try and make the use of it more obvious.

First change was to actually describe the feature with what we call the “welcome screen”.

Chatterbloc URL bar

Second was to add a new url bar. This give the look of a browser, and suggests that a url can be entered and viewed/shared. Hopefully this makes more sense.

Feedback

Anyway – we want my reader’s to give us some constructive feedback – so chuck it in the comments and let us crack on! If you want to join us for a chat, we might just be in a chatterbloc room – so come visit!