jducoeur

(I have a completely quiet weekend in which I mostly need to stay home, for reasons that will be discussed in a later entry. So let's spend a little time burbling on miscellaneous topics, starting with the driest but the one that's right in front of me.)

I've enthused at various people about SpatialChat over the past couple of years; this is a quick update.

Context: there are a bunch of platforms that let people hang out together in a "cocktail party" environment -- instead of just being all talking heads in boxes like Zoom or GChat, you are in a 2D "space" that you can wander around, and you see and hear the people who are "close" to you. The pandemic turned this niche idea into a pretty significant business, and lots of companies emerged to do this sort of thing.

Of the lot of them, SpatialChat is still my favorite: they have lots of little UX nuances that just work a bit better than the rest, and they've been rapidly adding specialized features to work better both as a co-working environment and as an event space.

That said, they've also been nailing down their business plan. Today's news is that the Free plan is (as of next week) about to drop to only 5 people at a time, rendering it near-useless for many of the casual social hangouts that we've been doing on it. That's a pity -- I'm not totally surprised by it, but it means that it's going to be less attractive for things like little Baronial hangouts.

In more mixed news, a while ago they moved from the "traditional" pricing plan for these services (roughly 1 cent/user/minute) to a flat $2/user/day for events. Whether that's good or bad depends on your use case, but it's a bit easier to plan for, and it encourages folks to hold events entirely in SpatialChat. Having been to a couple such conferences, that's not a bad thing.

So -- still a good service, and increasingly optimized for established teams and for events. But now getting a bit pricey for recreational use...