Marie LeBlanc Flanagan

Online Hangs

Websites, tools, and platforms for connecting, co-creating, exploring together online

drawing of people on laptops

Welcome!

Here you'll find a sampling of tools for connecting online including delightful musical collaboration sites, collaborative drawing sites, online galleries, weird experiments, corporate video-meeting tools, and office tools repurposed as spaces for gathering together.

What these tools have in common

  • Invite people to reach each other over the internet through typing, voice, video, drawing, music, or any expression that feels meaningful
  • Priority to tools accessed for free through a browser
  • Priority to the experimental, weird, home-made, simple, or barely working (anything with any interesting features is welcome)

Why Online Spaces?

I’ve always been curious about spaces for online connection. I mean, I’m infinitely curious about connection and online connection is no exception. 

The first time I entered an online chatroom I was mystified by the stream of $trang3 u$3rnam3$ echoing an indecipherable question: a/s/l? Once I decoded the meaning, I was even more lost. The portals to the infinite are opening and this is the question we ask?

To me the curious glory of this thing is presence without shared embodiment, touching minds without seeing or being seen, co-existence in an imaginary space that we might co-create with our minds and machines and words.

The List

Exploring together

illustration of a pixel-art room with a textbox that says 'hello' and a button that says 'talk'

Sound proximity & RPG map hangs

a screen with an enormous tree and a circle for each video call a space with trees and a fire and little circles representing people's heads a sparse world where the person is wandering through potted plants and around tables with beanbags

Watch Videos Together

  • Kosmi Watch videos and play games together
  • ohyay Video & playful rooms (poetry fridge, watch party, etc)

    • Drawing

    a sketch like drawing of a weird colourful creature with spindly legs

    Dance Parties

    a zoom call full of colourful fun people

    Spatial Video

    three colourful robots in a purple building

    Minimal

    an illustration of a bathroom with a toilet and wall graffiti a drawing of a cat and the text 'I can't talk about the things that matter'
    • Throne Room My virtual graffiti bathroom
    • Talkomatic 5 person early chat room
    • Sidebar Jump from video room to video room
    • Frog Chorus V’s frogland 

    Music

    a music score on a black background with bubbly shapes

    Words

    a simple set of black rectangles that people can write in - it says talkomatic at the top a purple

    Random matching

    Coding

    Collecting

    • Are.na Collecting & contextualizing

    Playful online office tools

    spreadsheet

    Corporate tools

    recurse

    Mapping out video call rooms

    Tools that require special hardware, apps, equipment or $$$

    • House Party Drop-in app with games
    • Run the world Events: talks, ama (upvotes), panels, cocktail parties
    • Rodeo drop-in voice app with friends & friends of friends
    • The Under Oculus Game
    • Endlesss/ Collaborative music-making app
    • Cocoon Group relationship communication app
    • Rec Room Software for VR avatar hangs
    • AF Concert in Minecraft 

    Security & Privacy

    Curious about privacy and security? Read about it in this handy '*privacy not included' resource from the Mozilla Foundation.

    What's next?

    While making this list I hosted a series of online gatherings where we explored some of these tools, websites, and platforms together.

    Since then I've been deeply thinking about the dimensions of these spaces. For example: is it a space for scheduled connection? Or spontaneous drop-in? Is it a space that flattens and dehumanizes? Or a space that humanizes and invites complexity? Is it a space of persistent identity? Or anonymity?

    I'll write more about these dimensions soon.

    Write me if you have spaces I should add to this list or if you have thoughts!

    ~

    Looking for stability instead of experimentation? I listed, compared and reviewed the most popular standard tools for meeting online.