A while back someone mentioned Hubski chat
Yeah, it was steve. Here's the post. Some interesting ideas in that post. One is a Hubski town hall suggested by lessismore. cgod mentioned that he'd be more likely to use text chat than video chat, I tend to agree. I do think a Hubski "town hall" is an interesting thought. Would anyone actually join? We had insomniasexx crash one of our calls on G+ once and she had some great ideas and feedback.
I like the idea of a town hall, but isn't all of Hubski already a town hall? I do think it would be a nice feature if hubbies had a real-time way of commenting, but it would also be great if there remained a record of that conversation as well. What if the existing comment threads just had a way to react real-time? What if when someone comments, it doesn't send you an email but instead lights something up on your control panel? What if, like on google chat, you could see a list of the people you are following and whoever is online will have their wheel a certain color - this would be toggleable of course. Did I just say toggleable?
I'm not much in favor of chat. I want Hubski to do some things well, and as a result, I am reticent about making it do too many different things. Feature creep can be bad. Although I could see the benefit in chatting with hubskiers from time to time, it is a pretty big deviation from the Hubski experience. We currently can communicate via comments and mail, I'm not sure how much adding chat would improve the site, and how much it would dilute the focus. Like sounds_sound said below, there's something nice about having a record of conversations. However, I don't want to keep chat records for a number of reasons.