BEECHAT is a project that we've had on the road map for a while that we're finally rolling out. The first implementation of it is working is in nftshowroom.com now. It's the ability to talk to your fellow Hive members directly in the website.
You can see me logging in with the Splinterlands account on nftshowroom.com and talking with the lead developer of the project reazuliqbal. Incidentally he has a witness: @bdcommunity. So, if you think that having a Hive wide chat feature for all hive websites is important you can support his work by voting his witness. Also, if you think it's important consider voting mine!
Why do this?
I love discord, and advocate for it vigorously, but not everyone is in it, and it's not a great experience to separate out simple chatting into a completely separate website/service. So, with BEECHAT you can get a conversation rolling. If it moves from chatting into planning a project or something bigger than an introduction then BEECHAT will likely be too limited, but for introductions, chatting with friends, saying hi to artists, and things like that it should be perfect.
Is it opensource?
We're working on open sourcing the client side as we speak. We need a add a few more basic features, but we expect this to happen in SEPTEMBER! Maybe it's pushed to October, but this is happening soon.
How can I add it?
Once the code is opensource you'll be able to add it to your site.
You'll connect to our websocket server
You'll authorize a user by sending a signed message with the posting key
The user receives a token
They'll start chatting
It's written in Vue.JS and we'll look into other ways to help folks get this on their site.
Why should I add it to my site?
I think the first couple of likely candidates for this are the blogging sites: hive.blog, peakd, and all the tribes. Imagine if you can start chatting with people in real time on the very website that you're on. So, not only leave a comment but actually message them as if it were social media in 2020... I think it's a massive leap forward to actually getting table stakes in place for these sites.
Others can use it too though. If you have a market, game, website, or whatever, you should allow your users to chat with one another. So, whatever is built on hive can now use your hive keys to chat.
chat is global
If I send you a message on nftshowroom.com and you're logged into lensy.io you'll get the message on both platforms (still have to implement chat on lensy, so this is an example).
Chat is stored for 90 days
We're currently planning to store chat for 90 days and delete things older than that. If you're exchanging early love letters or keys (probably don't want to put keys on this) then you'll want stuff backed up somewhere else.
Basic chat will be free
Chatting should be 1000BEE free. Maybe there's some advanced features we'll charge for, but adding it to your site will involve incorporating open source code for free, and using the messaging service will be free.
Try it now and start planning on incorporating it into your site
If you want to try it please login to nftshowroom.com. You can access the messenger through your profile (we'll add an icon to the top soon). Once you get the hang of what we're doing please start thinking through what you need to do to add it to your website.
Product Road map
- Opensource it
- Add group chats
- Add friends, view, approve/deny friend requests
- Add ability to only accept incoming messages from friends
- Add more features over time
- Monetize advanced features and opt-in ad space