Some really slick video/event system with instant messaging integration by SharpLogic - Hulu should listen up!

Lets say you have 1 computer with 1 screen. You watch a ton of video content (like 24 on Hulu). You like to watch full screen but don't want to miss IM conversations or other stuff. Why not integrate the IM straight into the video player with a subtle glow. That is what Ed from SharpLogic has done.

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Ed at SharpLogic is one of my heroes. He is a pleasure to work with and always goes the extra mile (debugging stuff at 4AM with you over email or IM!).

Chris (a PM for the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit) convinced Ed to write a guest post about how he built his rocking video/event system with IM capabilities.

Check out the post here and their site here.

Snipped from the post:

We’ve actually done this with Boost Events, a SharpLogic venture. Boost Events is a set of software and services designed to deliver great experiences for conferences. Our Silverlight UI integrates Windows Live Messenger so users can collaborate via IM while watching sessions, as well as being able to recommend sessions to each other.

In the screenshots below, two users have logged into Messenger from http://events.boostweb20.com/Events/MIX09. To recommend a session to another user, the first user drags that session’s tile onto an IM conversation. The recommendation is serialized and sent over the Messenger channel as an “application message”, which is deserialized and treated specially by the application to expose its own functionality. Messenger provides the underlying channel for messages, so there is no impact on our servers. Application messages are treated like other messages in the system, except that they’re not surfaced as text IMs since they’re intended to be transparent to all clients except those that expect them.