By day, I’ve been learning my way around the awesome Telepathy framework as part of my work with Collabora. By night, I’ve been busy hacking away on Yelp 3.0 (which, I don’t mind telling you, will rock). And somewhere in between, I’ve been contemplating how to make Yelp telepathic.
Here’s the general notion: When the help just isn’t helping you, you’d be able to connect to Live Help, which would be something like a chat room, hopefully populated with people who want to help. The Live Help chat would be attached to your Yelp window. Other users would be able to see what document you’re looking at, and send you pages which would open in your Yelp window.
The Live Help channel would also maintain a list of comments made about pages. So if somebody asks a damn good question, somebody could write something up in a comment on a page of the help document. As soon as you connect to Live Help, you’d get all the comments stored in the channel for the document you’re viewing.
This is a very rough idea right now. There are tons of technical and social problems that would have to be solved to make sure it works well. I’m curious if people have any thoughts, opinions, or criticisms. (And, by the way, we could totally extend this functionality to developer documentation as well, which I think would be awesome.)
