Real-time chat (live discussion mini-pad)

Etherpad is brilliant for collaboration but can be messy for real-time discussion. And the chat is so 90's compared to the modern, live-typing, document part!

IMHO the current chat panel should be replaced by a mini-pad chat, providing the same live-typing ability that Etherpad has.

I think such a discussion capability would broaden Etherpad's use-cases and would greatly differentiate it from Google Docs (which loses real-time updates when commenting or chatting and isn't suited either for live discussions).


*** This idea was first discussed here: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/issues/741 ***


Basically, such a live discussion panel would just be like an embedded pad, but where the text of each participants would be contained inside message-boxes labelled with their authors' names (like in forums, Google Groups or Apache Wave) to divide what each users have written.

That way it would look like a chat but would be updated live, character by character, as users type, thus providing dynamic live discussions -in *real* real-time.

The way I imagine it, it could be implemented by using an "Apache Wave"-like solution: A "click to reply" area under the chat history would, when clicked, be turned into a new editable (live-synced) message block.

► Mock-ups: http://goo.gl/5aDek & http://goo.gl/YaXP0