I've thought about making a real-time forum: basically the same thing as an ordinary forum software, but with presence capability and posts happening in real time without reloading. Or, if you look at it in another way, it would be a chat room with persistence, result is searchable, possibly threaded.
The hope is that conversations in such a medium would be something in between regular chat and regular forums, and they could be compelling enough.
The technology is not a big issue for building this, the Tornado framework has a chat example from which you can start. Text messages are short, they can be kept in memory and saved to disk once in a while either DIY or using something like Redis.
Yes, Wave has all the features, but seems focused on collaborative editing, rich media, send and synchronize individual keystrokes etc. - so I imagine a lot of the design decisions would be different.
I don't think I'm going to build it though - the type of forums I am interested in actually benefits from the perception that you have time to think through what you are saying.
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I've thought about making a real-time forum: basically the same thing as an ordinary forum software, but with presence capability and posts happening in real time without reloading. Or, if you look at it in another way, it would be a chat room with persistence, result is searchable, possibly threaded.
The hope is that conversations in such a medium would be something in between regular chat and regular forums, and they could be compelling enough.
The technology is not a big issue for building this, the Tornado framework has a chat example from which you can start. Text messages are short, they can be kept in memory and saved to disk once in a while either DIY or using something like Redis.
You've just described Google Wave. However, I think there's plenty of room in this space to come up with alternate implementations and interfaces.
Yes, Wave has all the features, but seems focused on collaborative editing, rich media, send and synchronize individual keystrokes etc. - so I imagine a lot of the design decisions would be different.
I don't think I'm going to build it though - the type of forums I am interested in actually benefits from the perception that you have time to think through what you are saying.