Flash Video Chat Project
The layout that you see attached is rough at this point. The design will change from that in the final but this should give you a good general idea of how we want it to work. We want to be able to do multiple video chats at once. So if you look at the top nav you will see main categories of sports. From there you click on one…Then go to sub category for instance Tennis is chosen in this design. Then in Tennis you see the sub categories for that main category. Then from the sub categories I picked French Open as the chat room that I wanted to go into. Now you see all the different categories of that sub category in the left hand column. You will also see a scroll bar there since there could be many categories here. If you select one of those categories (I chose Roger Federer in this layout) then it will bring up that chat room and the people that are in it. Now comes the tricky part. This is live video chatting so we must think of a way to manage this. Do you hear everyone chatting at once when you enter this room? Or do you hear just the person that you click on? One of the additional features I have here is you can select one of the people in this chat room and then click “Request a 1 on 1” button and then it will bring that person up in the right hand column larger (if that person accepts your request). So if I DON’T request a 1 on 1 I was thinking that I could chat with all people here. I need to stick a scrolling chat window in there someplace too…I mean a text chatting like you see when you text-chat in Skype or Yahoo Instant Messenger or something like that. I think we need a way to communicate that way with people we well.
OK, so the main thing now is to figure out how to manage the room full of live video chatters in the center and if we should have them all live and audible when you arrive in this room. I was thinking of something like this: Maybe we have it so that there is a text field below all the little video window (like the one over in the right column under the large video chat) and then that could be a statement or question that I can type into the field and click submit (or invite) which would send my question or statement to everyone in that room. This would essentially send everyone in that room an invite to communicate with me about my question or statement that I just sent. They would see it in there text chat (IM) window. If there are people interested in what I have to say they can accept my invite and activate me which would connect me to whomever accepts…Then I am live with that person. It could end up being many many people or it could be just one or two. Maybe we put a limit on this since it could end up being hundreds of people if this gets large. Maybe we put a limit of 25 people or something like that that could be engaged in one particular conversation. What do you think? Then if someone ends up dropping out it opens up that slot for someone else to enter into that conversation. I am still working out how this will work. You can let me know if you have thoughts on this too.
Some of the features to think about in the meantime is:
• Create a chat room which allows users to create their own category in the left hand column (within a main sub category. It would automatically add that category into the room. This would somehow need to be automated so that old entries could be deleted or purged from the system after so many days and/or lack of users participating in it so that it doesn’t get too in there.
• Invite friends which brings up a page to quickly and easily allow users to invite their friends from their email lists, facebook, myspace, twitter, etc accounts so this would need to be quick and easy way to automatically get their contacts. Tokbox (http://www.tokbox.com/) has a nice way of doing it…Something like that
• Need a way to send video messages which would allows users to record a video message and then send to their email. They would get responses to this through their account only. Tokbox also has a nice way of doing this…We want something similar.
• Need to be able to create user account. There will be two levels when registering…Free and paid membership. We will block some features for free memberships (like create a room, video messages, maybe 1 on 1 chats…things like that)
• I think when you register and get into the chat room that your live video stream should always be in the top left of the center window so that you always see your own video.
• There will be individual controls on each of the users shown in the center window (like mute, report abuse, block, favorite) I will come up with some sort of small buttons/nav for each window in addition to that person’s name which you can see now.
• The search feature will be for anyone searching for specific sports related rooms.
• We would DEFINITELY need some filtering involved here…ESPECIALLY with video (if possible). We don’t want idiots on this ruining it for everyone else with porno and profanity. They WILL show up and we need it filtered. How do we do this with live video chat. We will also need to somehow set up audio monitoring where it monitors the type of language so that certain curse words don’t transmit. We want to try to keep this clean!! Then the system can ban someone for breaking the rules. I would like the curse words to just be silenced if possible….That would be great. There must be a way to do this! So if you say: “that Brett Farve is an ass and plays like shit” – well then the words “ass” and “shit” would just be silenced in that sentence. It simply won’t transmit certain words that we program in. Now for video…Not sure how to do that. What if someone gives the middle finger…Or starts to show nudity? We must ban this somehow. This site must remain clean for users.
• We would like to have a current NEWS stories section that has the daily sports news stories and highlights. We would need to pull this in from some place so that it is automated. Would also like a sports score ticker that always scrolls showing the latest sports scores for all teams and sports played (this can be something we work on last).
• Newsletter section so we can manage all users and send communications out to all contacts/users.
• would need credit card processing for paid membership with auto renew every month. Of course all users could always cancel at any time from within their account.
• We need to be able to have a running database with admin control panel of all users, account status, current membership level and the ability to manage this database and send enewsletters to the group of users
Surely there will be some more things that come up but wanted to get you started on thinking about some of these things now so you can give me any questions and feedback and recommendations. I would also need your recommendations on the proper host server for all this as well. Will we require a FMS (Flash Media Server)? I know they are costly so perhaps there is some alternatives for a new site like this that won’t have a lot of traffic immediately. Site MUST be compatible for all!