Real-time community support

[Me You]

Hey Ubuntu IRC, my name is Taso and I've been working as the lead engineer
on a platform for real-time communities and support with another engineer
for a bit over a year now.  You can check out what we have at
http://tap.info .  Tap ( our product ) allows for easily accessible
and scalable real-time communities to be created so that you can have large
group discussion and moderation within a specific community.  If you use the
search you'll see that we already have a fair amount of open source and
programming projects setup on tap , and we've setup a few for you guys based
off of your irc channels.  The demo we setup is here:
http://tap.info/group/ubuntu  .. we also setup a few others so when you
search for Ubuntu you'll get back some results that allow you to connect to
the appropriate niche.

A lot of our functionality and innovation comes from a bug that was reported
in the Ubuntu community forums,
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-community/+bug/392799 ... as our sole
purpose was not Ubuntu, nore IRC at first, we soon realized as we were
creating our product that many things that we were doing were very similar
to IRC and Ubuntu (as a community) seemed to be the perfect example of the
pain point we're aiming to solve; scalable real-time communities; and that
problem will only grow with Ubuntu and other communities in the future as
growth progresses.

Everything on tap is as real-time as IRC or any chat, as we a TCP/HTTP
translation layer similar to the comet protocol for doing all of our
real-time interaction, using JavasScript.  Currently there are a few smaller
communities using our site, but we've built things to scale and we would
also like to see how a community such as Ubuntu would perform using what
we've built.  It's sorta like Twitter meets Google Wave, with a focus on
communities.  Threaded conversations allow for a community to grow much
larger in size, as the majority of chatter in a chatroom is a response to
something that was originally said, when you thread the conversations, you
essentially grow the ability to have more users by the percentage of
responses, which is about 80-90%, as that's what makes a chatroom such as on
IRC so "noisy".

One other huge benefit is that, believe it or not, most developers don't use
or don't even realize IRC still exists.  Living in the heart of Silicon
Valley, it's still the consensus that IRC has gone away; which of course
many people would disagree with, but it's kinda fact; as only 60,000 users
on freenode active, and that's extremely small compared to even the user
base of Ubuntu.  By creating an easy to use and easily accessible real-time
community on the web, you would be opening up support to lots of people.
 Our search also allows you to create a community with a niche corresponding
to the keywords, so that in the even that a community does get to big by
chance ( it would have to be over a million users or so to make a
quality/noise difference ), then you would see  could split up the channel
based on the keywords, so that when users search they get a 'tap room'
relevant to the niche.

Well, we built tap so that scaleable real-time communities can exist, and we
see a lot of uses for them, we hope that you guys will give tap a shot , as
that would be terrific for everyone involved.  Currently we linked it to
Freenodes authentication so that when you join you automatically have the
permissions relevant to your moderation status, and so that we can limit
users, as our back-end is pretty large so we thought it would be good to
limit it to freenode for the time being.

We just released tap less then 24 hours ago and we hope that you guys find
it as useful.  We hope we tap can become the new IRC and that real-time
communities can flourish in mass while keeping very high quality.  That's
our goal.  Looking forward to hearing everyones thoughts on this.

Taso.
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