This has been attempted a few times before without a whole lot of success. There was one plugin launched fairly recently that added a sidebar user-contributed Wiki to every site. And there was another before that where you could add virtual "graffiti" to sites. It's a neat idea, but I think it'll be pretty difficult to generate a critical mass (before it gets overtaken by spam and trolls)
Critical mass for something like this is a nasty problem, but I think it could be cracked. Firefox is a bit of a selective user base to begin with (the +/- 10% userbase are probably very heavily weighted towards the tech savvy), and if you could get critical mass for one site that has a large Firefox user base on which the chat would be very helpful (say, Wikipedia) spreading out from there could be just a matter of time if you play your cards right.
Also, I haven't tried it, but I do hope there's an option to easily disable it because, after all, _I_ am only looking at the realnursestakeiteverywhere.com for educational purposes, but I definitely don't want to talk with those _other_ losers there.
Definitely. I have seen at least couple other firefox extensions to do the same thing (here's one: http://www.yakalike.com/). I was involved in a drawing/graffiti type one last year (http://drawhere.com). It was fun to try and get done in javascript, but it was hard to hold people's interest for an extended period. There's a history of this stuff failing: http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,42803-2,00.html
I'll be curious to see if/how someone gets it to stick.
This seems like a great time-waster idea. It would probably be very addictive if it ever got critical mass. Naturally I think it will be impossible to monetize on its own, but it will be awesome when a profitable company buys them out.
Cool idea, but I don't think the terms and conditions would allow it. You're not allowed to embed them directly into an application. A HTML page that the application displays that is accessible from any browser should be OK, but you'd lose the 'sense' part. Maybe ads for the most popular sites, with specially created HTML pages with hidden text (if Google overlooks that, which I doubt) that guides the adsense, would work.
It has been a while since I looked at it - I was pondering building a consumer app supported by adsense but decided it was probably too much trouble.
