Is Hive7 Ajax heaven?
Posted by Steven on April 22nd, 2006
Seems that Hive7 is making its way into quite a few articles recently. I would classify this site as being a fairly interesting attempt at creating an online community. So probably your wondering what is all the hype about and is it worth your bother?
Well first of all it’s free!! (which in this world means its a must to check it out), but jokes aside seriously its a great site. As soon as you load up the page you find that you have been issued an avatar and a guest account. With these you are also assigned the rights to post lines onto the chat and also to drag character around the rooms which are available to you. Whilst browsing through these room you will notice other avatar which might be jumping around the page, these pertain to the other users who are currently viewing the page with you and whom you may chat with.
The author of the site also attempted at writing a system where users can play games such as chess or checkers. This feature still seems to be in its infancy and will need a lot more development before it is useful. There does not seem to be a fixed way of enforcing rules in games and if too many users are playing there might be a mess in the rooms.
One thing that struck me was the option of allowing users to upload their own avatars. This feature unfortunately like most other systems in the world offers space for abuse. Barely minutes after i logged into hive a user discovered this feature and started uploading avatars with adult content which most users including myself find as distasteful.
For anyone who is interested in Ajax Hive7 would make a wounderful playground. Ajax is the new technology for asynchronous communication. It was thanks to this technology that sites like GTalk’s interface in Gmail and Hive7 came into being. I would like to point out though that although Ajax is very fast and powerful, it also means that it relies on the client side browser to do the rendering which due to the large amounts of html and javascript can slowdown from time to time making Hive7 feel as if it were over loaded when in reality it would more probably then not be the clients internet connection or computer performance.
So my final remark is that Hive7 is a great initiative and deservers a round of applause!
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