Looks great. I've seen similar projects and I think these disposable group chats are very powerful.
My biggest problem is that I never remember them for when I need them and resort to group chats. Often that's "good enough" but for when everyone isn't on the same network something like this would be nice. Again, the hardest part is thinking about the service when I need it.
A feature request would be file attachments. It's 2013 and attaching a file in a chat is still extremely painful and rarely works.
Gee, thanks! We were thinking that we'd allow other websites to take a url and embed it within their site or collaborative area. Do you think that will help?
A great and simple idea and a service that I think a lot of small companies would actually pay for if you execute it well. The front page of HN will be a good load test...
However I'd also be concerned about security - if you're trying to sell this as a service, you'd need to password protect groups somehow and ideally serve on https. Can't see this on the site right now but presumably you're planning to offer this? Perhaps this is just an experiment, but having no guarantees like this would not reassure me - ideally chats should be namespaced too so that there are no issues with collisions of chat room names.
There's no way I'd type anything useful into a chat like this without basic security in place and being reassured about how the data was stored and deleted. Chats are just too prone to leaking information because they're so informal, so it's even more important than email in a way. In fact I'd probably prefer to buy the software and run it on my server to be sure about that if actually using it.
Embedding it within a site isn't as useful for me, personally. Possibly for others.
Perhaps the ability to pay for a permanent URL (or chat room ID) so a team can bookmark it for times when they need to chat. Or a URL I can easily send to someone without having to always "register" a new one.
I can see that being part of a paid tier (along with TLD mapping, UI customization, etc).
> Failed! "sodihfoihvocin" may exist, try another name
Hmm. Every name I tried gave me this message. At first I thought it was because I used obvious names that other people had used, like "test" and "foobar", but even the above random string of gibberish failed.
If you're going to give people a unique URL to give out, then can we have non unique group names? I couldn't find a relevant group name that wasn't already taken, so resorted to mashing the keyboard
Interesting. I've been working on a very similar concept but based on IRC. There's a version running here: http://lalo-g7stltno.dotcloud.com/
Once authenticated with your Twitter account you can join a room using the URL, the path represents a room/channel. The cool thing is that you can also join to that channel using a standard IRC client as well.
When me and a friend of mine were experimenting in creating a web chat we realized that inserting new messages into the beginning of page (or div) is much better for both users and developers. No bothering with autoscrolling. No user distraction of autoscrolling when he reads previous messages. It was really a good decision.
Anyway IRC is much better. I don't want to live my life in a multitabbed web browser window.
Failed! "this name is clearly not in use due to the random string of characters it ended with ~agsh1das82S~" may exist, try another name
Perhaps the system is overloaded, or they use a dynamically generated unique identifier with each room, such as a short URL of 3-6 characters, if they're numeric only HN and Reddit could probably fill it pretty quickly - but without any more information, this is all guess work.
typed in three choices of group name: one a dictionary word, another a university module code, the last a random selection of about 20+ letters. All three choices returned the same error message - that this group may already exist.
My biggest problem is that I never remember them for when I need them and resort to group chats. Often that's "good enough" but for when everyone isn't on the same network something like this would be nice. Again, the hardest part is thinking about the service when I need it.
A feature request would be file attachments. It's 2013 and attaching a file in a chat is still extremely painful and rarely works.