Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other

A few weeks ago, I added a silly, funny experiment on this website. I talked about it on this blog post. It was a tiny Town Square at the bottom of every page 2. When you visit the site, you'll see a small strip populated by stick figures. Each figure represents another visitor currently browsing the website. You can see what page people are reading, walk around and send messages. For example, you could see someone reading the same article as you and start a discussion about it. The goal wasn't to build another social network. It was to bring back a small feeling that the web used to have: the sense that there are actual people on the other side of the screen. Town Square is intentionally tiny and forgetful. There are no accounts, no profiles, no follower counts, no permanent chat history. Messages exist only while people are there to read them. After several people asked me how they could add this to their own websites, I decided to open source it and provide a public server, so…