Mangosteem : Steem powered Web Chat

A shout out to @mynameisbrian for http://alpha.mangosteem.chat/

Do note that it is just a couple of days old and is already in a very usable state. Today I took a dig at it and here are my observations.

Look and feel

If you have used Slack, Discord or RocketChat then you should be already familiar with this interface and you should feel at home. Account details on the top left. Channel listing below them. Chat on the right and chat box at the bottom. The top most information icons gives you details about the channel.

Login and sign up

The app uses steemconnect which is a good sign. I am not comfortable with websites sharing my Posting keys on their websites. With https://steemconnect.com I can be little more confident as it is built by Steem and you have an option of selecting which permissions you would like to grant.

I wish there was an option to revoke permissions to apps using Steemconnect. That would give us more courage to explore new apps without worrying about security.

Channels and chats

As of now there are only a couple of channels.

1 alternative-music
2 Food
3 gaming
4 General
5 Homesteading
6 Mangosteem
7 Price
8 Testing

If you would like to add a new channel follow the steps from https://steemit.com/mangosteem/@mynameisbrian/mangosteem-let-s-get-some-channels-going
Select your favorite channel and chat away. If anybody likes your chats then can upvote your comment/chat and you will get paid for that. How cool is that. It would be great if somebody could create channel #steemithelp. In a couple of days I think it will become the post popular channel as minnows could head their to ask their questions and find answers. And the users who generally can't make much money on the platform can be active on the channel and for every query they answer there is a chance of getting an upvote from the user(and hence the payout). This could also address the problem of minnows loosing their motivation initially. What better solution that earning their first payout by helping more newbies to navigate steemit better.

Behind the screens

1. I like the simplicity and how well made use of existing features of Steem.
2. For each channel a new account is created. For price channel the account is @ms-price. The display name serves as the name of the channel. Description of the user serves as the description of the channel.
3. First post represents the channel. The price channel is actually the post https://steemit.com/mangosteem-channel/@ms-price/mangosteem-message-archive
4. All the chats in that channel are actually the comments on that post.

You can see my comment from the image above here https://steemit.com/mangosteem-channel/@ms-price/mangosteem-message-archive#@gokulnk/re-ms-price-mangosteem-message-archive-20170903t061146311z

Suggestions

1. Make the process of creating a channel easy.
2. Ability to use the slider while up-voting a chat.
3. Simplify the process of creating a channel. You can actually have a bidding system to create a channel and use that Steem for the development of the project.
4. Make the channel description more visible.
5. Allow editing of chats for at-least first 5 mins. Since it is a comment it can be edited for 7 days.
6. Threaded reply in chats could be great.
7. Ability to sort the chats based on popularity like we can do in comments.
8. Ability to make a comment a sticky post for the creator of the channel. He can use this for promotions etal and if anybody is thankful for the channel they can upvote that particular comment.
9. Work around for the 20 sec comment/chat posting limit.

Success of the project

This is a project that must become successful as it will prove what I have been telling all along : By promoting Steem as Blockchain based social media we are doing it a disservice. Steemit is a blockchain based content management platform and it should get its due. Steemit is just one interface of Steem blockchain. The underlying power comes from Steem and it can be used to power many more services like MangoChat. Success of MangoChat can make people realise this and that is why success of Mangochat is important.

For this service to be successful rewarding the creator and the participants is very important. So I went to https://steemit.com/@mynameisbrian and upvoted a couple of his posts. I would suggest you do the same for couple of posts that you find interesting. Going forward we can do this for the account https://steemit.com/@mangosteem so that it will serve as a community account for the project. Since the power/voting slider is not there in the chat yet I went to https://steemit.com/mangosteem-channel/@ms-price/mangosteem-message-archive and upvoted a couple of chats/comments that I found interesting and useful.

Resteem this to spread the word about MangoChat and make it a successful app. Let us hope that one day this will be successful enough so that we can see the link to this chat app directly within the Steemit page.

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I am also working on [Steemqa](https://steemit.com/qa/@gokulnk/q-a-site-based-on-steem-brainstorming) Steem powered QA site. If you are a React Front End developer do drop a comment so that we can work on it together. We have a designer onboard and we will be posting the designs for the project shortly. If you are a designer and would like to contribute mention the same in the comments.

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If you find this article useful Resteem it and leave a comment with the text "reSteemed".
I will cross check your blog for the resteem and give your comment a 100% upvote.
While I am at it, I would love to follow you if you are writing interesting posts.

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