Relay

Free live chat for your website.

11 followers

Free live chat for your website.

11 followers

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Relay Chat adds anonymous, IRC-style chat on every domain on the Internet, so you can chat with other people browsing the same website.

Launch tags:Chrome Extensions

Launch Team

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Meme Factory

Very forward thinking project. Love the direction they are taking. The future of the internet is going to be agnostic overlays over everything from websites, games, apps, VR/AR, and other devices. Can't wait to see more of this type of development. Pros: - It gives the internet back to people to some degree in a nostalgic manner. It allows you to use websites, communicate, and connect like you could in the early days, on your terms without platform capture and communication monopolization/balkinization. - Smooth UI, easy to use, light weight. Cons: - It is going to get difficult to self moderate as it scales and will likely need to fall back on some sort of private rooms. This could have some strange unintended side effects where influential groups of people dominate the conversation on a single website in the public channels. - A lot of difficult UI/UX trade-offs will have to be made eventually - Platforms like this tend to get persecuted when certain ideological groups move in. Will be fascinating to see the direction this takes to ensure it stays open and flexible. Overall, the cons are longer term and general open platform concerns more than anything. These issues could be solved the same way similar problems were solved on IRC. Though this may sacrifice it's simplicity and elegance at some level. Not much to do there. Scaling is scaling and I see this platform going far. So this is a good problem to have. Cheers! Loving it so far 😎

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7yr ago

Relay

Maker

Hey Brady, Thank you so much for your comment! It really means a lot, especially coming from one of our long-time users! I hope you’re right about the development/trend of agnostic overlays. I totally agree with you about the perils of ideological domination. It’ll be difficult to moderate conversations across the whole Internet and maintain a culture that’s open and inclusive, but we have some strategies/lead bullets that should help. I’m looking forward to seeing how the product develops as it’s informed by user feedback. Excited to continue chatting with you as Relay scales :)

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7yr ago

Relay

Maker

Thanks for hunting us, @kevin! And thanks @wheeling51 for your help on the thumbnail! Hi Product Hunt! 😻 This is a dream come true. I’m so excited to launch Relay, a browser extension that adds chat to every website. With Relay, every domain has a built-in, chat-based community that’s at most a click away. Think of it like embedded Discord in your browser, where the channel is whatever website you’re on. People are chatting live right now on producthunt.com! We built Relay to provide a categorically more seamless social experience. We’ve given every domain its own community in a web that’s increasingly dominated by only a few unscrupulous social platforms. We couldn’t be more excited to have you join us. People are already using Relay to get help on Stackoverflow, engage with their own site’s visitors, watch shows together on Netflix, solicit career advice on LinkedIn, talk to other developers on localhost, instantly connect in online classrooms, leave their mark on Google, and pretty much anything else you can think of. It would mean the world to us if you helped us by sharing Relay, whether on social media or offline with your friends. A community is only as great as its members, and I’m sure you all know some great people! If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment below or chat with me on Relay. - Sam

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7yr ago

@sam_winter Hey Sam! I thought of this idea back in 2016 and noticed some other people tried it before as well (https://www.forbes.com/sites/eri...). I loved the idea and thought it was so cool, my app was going to be called UbiqiChat hehe. I never decided to pursue making it because I saw that the other people who tried it, it didn't take off and I couldn't find a way to monetize it. I'm glad that you are making it and it seems like your are going to make it right! How do you plan on monetizing?

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7yr ago

Relay

Maker

@james_osullivan thank you for the question and your kind words! There's a graveyard of failed website-specific chat ideas. They fail for two reasons: they can't reach critical mass (most common) or they become toxic (Dissenter). Much of our secret sauce for monetizing and growth and even moderation to some extent will be selling Relay as a widget. We've built a prototype and are putting in some finishing touches.

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7yr ago

Selon que nous soyons Français ou Turc ou autre... J'imagine qu'on peut parler dans notre langue avec cet objet ?

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7yr ago

Like the old chatrooms of yesteryear's internet and modern day discord, I'm impressed that we can have a disqus-like real time chat on any website. For me, that's a huge utility. I can see it being extremely helpful in hobbyist boards, communities, and blogs.

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7yr ago

Relay

Maker

@elliott_tran thank you! Can't wait to see all the use cases we haven't even dreamed of.

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7yr ago

Duplikit

Cool idea! I think there will need to be a way to focus conversation. Otherwise it will just be a lot of "hi", "hello", "what's up". Unlike a live event or live stream, there isn't a single thing everyone is watching and can comment on Also, the bottom right placement goes over a lot of the site chat icons (intercom, drift, etc)

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7yr ago

Relay

Maker

@robmoore That's a great point. Hopefully the "hi"s start to die down after launch day. We'll also break the conversation by path etc. (e.g., subreddit-specific chat) on a case-by-case basis as we grow. As far as the placement, you can drag the button around. You can also toggle Relay's visibility by clicking its icon in the browser menu.

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7yr ago

Cool project. If only it was launchable from Chrome's extensions bar instead of injecting it into websites... You can't just assume that part of the screen is free for grabs for any website and I wouldn't want to see the icon always there.

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7yr ago

Relay

Maker

@devjah Totally hear you on that! To respect users' screen real estate, we made clicking the Relay icon in the browser toggle its visibility. Once you click it, it won't show again until you click it again. Hope that helps!

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7yr ago