An Expirement in Live Web Development Through Chatrooms
Shaun and I recently partnered with Darren over at OneBadWheel.com, a popular nascar site for fantasy players and stats junkies. Now, I will be the first to admit that I am a complete NASCAR Noob. You could present to me 10 pictures of the most famous and successful NASCAR drivers and I probably couldn’t name a single one. But, this opportunity is really exciting for me because we’re going to get to develop the interface and gameplay for 3 fantasy NASCAR games. Darren’s getting me up to speed quickly on the rules and nuances of NASCAR stats, and from a pure web development standpoint, fantasy games are just about as fun as it gets.
One of the things we want to do is bring a lot of the “Web 2.0″ (I hate that term) leading-edge web tech to the world of NASCAR. Shaun’s created a twitter account for OneBadWheel, we’re using a lot of ajax techniques and incorporating a lot of jQuery UI elements into the site and game design, and we’ve set up a Multi-User WordPress system for a bunch of NASCAR bloggers.
Live Chat Experiment
We are also expirementing with something that’s new (to me atleast) — I’ve put a meebo chatroom on the sidebar of every page billing it as a “direct line” to the developers of the site. We’ve already had a few support questions or bugs through our wufoo support form (see! another web2.0 widget), but we’re literally pushing loads of new features every night trying to get it all in before the start of the NASCAR season (Feb 15th). We want something more live, more immediate. Enter the meebo chatroom. Now, anyone (you don’t have to be signed up for meebo to participate) can shoot us a message.
How will this experiment work out? Who knows. I think it’s a win-win to give it a try. But what about user experience, you say. Meebo’s infrastructure is robust, and we’re loading their chatroom last so I am not concerned with any kind of pageload issues. There isn’t a discernable screen flash, or resizing of divs when meebo’s room loads, so I think usability is impacted very little. Seems like the worst case here is if nobody uses the damn thing I wasted all this time writing a blog post!
I’m excited to see how this experiment goes and I’ll be sure to update with another blog post. I’ve embeded the chatroom below for anyone interested in joining the conversation:
