News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
	Marc Canter Braindumps on Chat

From Marc Canter, marc@mediband.com:

I was surprised by your relevation that Chat is important. That's something that's been in the back of my head for years - iterally - but we never talk about it.

I first became aware of it when Marc Geiger - who started a number of the original music sites and ended up sitting there with Microsoft - with them trying to buy him out - when he lreaized that chat was the thing that no one saw coming. Chat rooms on music are changing the face of the music industry and ALL of the music labels will eventually have chat on their sites - and chat is the community builder we all dream about. Wjat Marc and I realized back in '94 is that traditional attitudes about content, commerce and community/customers were being left behind by Chat and other web implications.

The other thing, while I'm at it - was your relevation of what you can do with CoCo's studio - that is - do a radio show - with interviews - that really communicate something beyond just written text. Of course you'd want to put up transcriptions of those conversations - so that they can be indexed, sorted and searched on - but what I'm really trying to get at is...

Video is the ultimate Chat! Think of videoconferencing as the combination of text chat and a radio show.

Now look at he world of teleconferencing and you'll see that QuickTime Conferencing was the final straw that kept me at Apple for so long and what finally pushed me away - when they dropped it.

Hiring John Worthington was the first thing I did when I started MediaBar development work. I knew that having hi-res videophones at every MediaBar station was the ultimate way that I'd make a significant impact on the world today. Worthington was one of the managers of the QuickTime time and we went out and bought MPEG encoding cards (and I spent about $100k) trying to get QuickTime conferencing working with hardware encoding cards (it never did!)

Just to let you now how much Ries and Trout have influenced me - by the time I realized that Chat was the shit - I also was turned off - as I was not in a postion to take a leadership - significant role in that field. So I became transfixed (and still am!) on videophones and solving what I see as the Holy Grails of Chat - which is high quality videophones.

Once you get into implementing that - you realize you need Designated Drivers and Recipients (which we have working in the MediaBar) and you also learn all sorts of things about MPEG and hardware based streaming video compression - which doesn't like to be switched into or out of - on the fly.

So - YES - I've realized that Chat is tremendously important and my answer is to provide high quality videophones as part of a broadband platform environment.

:-)

P.S. These are some of the tidbits I learned over the last year - while trying to build MediaBar. There's also a bunch of other things I've learned - if you're interested.

P.P.S. BTW - I have a audio studio - equivalent to CoCo's! - so it's a phonecall away from you doing a high quality, radio show like interview - of anybody, anytime. We can even schlep the equipment to your house - not a big deal!