Dear Readers,
We are collaborating with the company Now4real to bring you a new feature: the ability to chat in real time with any other people who happen to be visiting 3QD at the same time. You will notice in the left lower corner of your screen a widget which looks like the image shown at the top right of this post. The large number in the center indicates the number of current visitors reading 3QD. The smaller number in the little circle indicates the number of unread messages currently posted and available to read by clicking the widget.
Once you post a message in the chat area, it is available for anyone to read and respond to for 3 hours, after which it will automatically be deleted. We are not completely sure whether this will prove to be a useful way for 3QD readers to communicate with each other but it is an interesting supplement to comments and we are going to try it out as an experiment for a couple of weeks. Please let us know in the comments area of this post if you find it useful and would like us to keep it permanently.
Here is some information about the company provided by Now4real:
With Now4real, we aim at introducing a new paradigm for the web. We call it “instant communities”. An instant community is the group of people who happen to be visiting the same web page at the same time. The moment an online article is being read by someone, it becomes like a virtual place because a human is dedicating time and attention to it. That person is at home, in the office, or on a train, but is also on the web page containing that article. It’s quite surprising that until now, there has been no means for people to meet in these virtual places. Now4real connects these people in real time, by detecting and showing how many readers are present “right now” and where they are from in the world, and by providing a live group chat dedicated to that website. Chat messages are ephemeral, to stimulate the continuous birth of new and extemporaneous instant communities.
Try it and see if you like it! NEW POSTS ARE BELOW.