Virtual footprints on a site/page?

elucas commented 4 years ago

How can we show that someone has recently been on a page(or site) or is currently on it?

For instance, WhatsApp has little green ticks to show that a message has been sent, received and then read, and user profiles show text like "Last seen yesterday at ...".

What about web pages? e.g. when someone is on a web page and about to start a video chat. Is the other person there? Have they just navigated somewhere else

This isn't a system in itself, just a piece of UX+infrastructure to provide ambient presence signalling.

I think we need:

Some sort of backend websocket-y user-tracking logic (but without too much privacy violation)
Frontend widget

lpmi-13 commented 4 years ago

Google Chrome plugin? Coupled with firebase backend to store last x places an opted-in user has been to?

spikeheap commented 4 years ago

This is really interesting. The idea of not just showing presence, but showing recent presence, gives more context for conversations – like footprints in sand that disappear after a while, you don't much care that a person has visited a page at some point in the past.

remotehack / remotehack.github.io

Virtual footprints on a site/page? #6