Introducing... Talkinator(tm)

Mailinator's creation was rather an exercise in disbelief. After all, there isn't much to it - in fact, its just email with some key components removed. That is, no sign-in, no registration, and no passwords. At first glance, it seemed like there'd be no purpose for such a thing - but people on the Internet have a sneaky way of finding uses for new paradigms.

From that idea, Mailinator has a new little brother - Talkinator. If you've used Mailinator in the past few days its likely you've bumped into it. Its doing for internet chat what Mailinator did for email. No sign-in, no registration, no passwords. Fully embeddable in any website you want - or use it right from the Talkinator site.

As with Mailinator, privacy is not guaranteed or even implied(in the current incarnation, it sort of can't be) - so never put any personal information in Talkinator (or anywhere else on the Internet for that matter).

Talkinator is partially a part-two of the Mailinator experiment. Its also partially a logical extension - and also partially just the result of me tinkering around with a lot of ideas. It took a surprisingly long time to write, but thats partially because I wasn't in a hurry. Its using what is to me, a very experimental server architecture (which I'll write about eventually.. if it ends up working :) ).

Almost everything is custom including the webserver right down to the http parsing. That includes the RPC mechanism and even the http encoding. Non-custom parts include using the GWT to create the javascript client (which rocks) and Cliff Click's non-blocking hash map (which also rocks). It is in essence, an exercise in re-inventing the wheel AND premature optimization (or at least "meticulous optimization" - whether or not its premature is up to debate).

There's plenty more to say here from a user and technical standpoint, but I'll stop talking for now - so that you can start.