September 20, 2001

1:19 PM

This is cool...and fun...and bizarre!!!
I stumbled across this on ScriptingNews -- so take a look here first. It's weird -- to say the least-- but it's very cool too... like playing and chatting while you browse (sorta). Anyway, you have to be running msie 5.5 for it to work... and there's a limit of only 15 concurrent users [just beta].

So if you get in, don't hog it! =) And if you can't get in, go dig the demo instead.
posted by blackholebrain (13 comments total)

hmmm... if you just get the scriptingnews.com page --and no little green things-- then q42's server just bumped you through... keep trying!
posted by blackholebrain at 1:41 PM on September 20, 2001

Related metatalk post.
posted by kathryn at 1:43 PM on September 20, 2001

I hit the CNN version of it. After a very long time I had these green bugs on my screen. Some quacked and jumped about. I could not find my avater. Then IE crashed. It seems painfully slow (first impression).
posted by kokogiak at 1:44 PM on September 20, 2001

it worked great for me.. (IE 5.5) i think there are a lot of people trying it out right now though.
posted by smt at 1:46 PM on September 20, 2001

But no one's talking....
posted by fleener at 1:50 PM on September 20, 2001

Wow!!! I've always wanted to go to a page that crashes my browser! That's really neat!
posted by dogmatic at 1:56 PM on September 20, 2001

not so bad with IE6, but i got some serious slow down occasionally.
posted by eyeballkid at 2:14 PM on September 20, 2001

Seeing as my computer crashes when I so much as look at it normally, I think I'll give the green bugs a miss..
posted by Mossy at 2:19 PM on September 20, 2001

Got thru, figured it out. VERRRRY slow.
posted by bjgeiger at 2:46 PM on September 20, 2001

Works great for me, except there's no one else there. Hmmm.

Nice DHTML work, though. Zero-install!
posted by scottandrew at 2:59 PM on September 20, 2001

Worked great for me, too. I have Win2000 & IE6, so maybe that was the magic combo?

I have to admit that I really like this little idea. It's clever how the little green aliens get all wiggly when the user is typing, and how, if you move your little maroon alien (that was how I knew which alien was me) away from the other green aliens, they get smaller so you aren't distracted by chatting you're not involved in.

And the coolest? I ran into Ev when I was there. The application served its purpose, humanizing the webpage by showing me who else was looking at the same page as I was...in this case, it was someone I knew!

And more than anything else, it's cute. Really cute. Ok, so shoot me for liking cute things.
posted by arielmeadow at 5:09 PM on September 20, 2001

isn't this what odigo does? in a slightly different manner.
posted by physics at 9:53 AM on September 21, 2001

Hello,

I'm one of the developers of Quek. And I would like to explain some things.

First of all we didn't expect this, nor had we hoped for this.
Innocent as we are, we just made a demo and put it online. But once scripting.com got a hold of it it turned into an avalanche.

We were not aiming to build a chat application. That is why so many common features are missing. We just wanted to build a demo that showed how nice it is if people can see who else is on. And we wanted to show this demo to potential customers.

We were overwhelmed by all the, almost exclusively, positive reactions. And we are ashamed we didn't do a better job. Browsers do tend to crash, our server can't handle the load... We were totally unprepared.

But. Where to go from here?

We have no fixed plans. Maybe we should spend some more time and make Quek a useful and fun tool.

Maybe we should explore what else can be achieved by applying the underlying principles.

I, for one, am thirsty for interesting ideas.

Anyone?
posted by Lon at 4:42 AM on September 22, 2001