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

likelike

Sound proximity & RPG map hangs

here cosy topia

Watch Videos Together

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

    • Drawing

    drawchat

    Dance Parties

    clubq

    Spatial Video

    hubs

    Minimal

    throneroom throneroom
    • 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

    plink

    Words

    talkomatic tilde

    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.