Times when map was just a big book with pretty drawings depicting locations are long gone and so are times when chat was just a website with many lines of text written above one another. The Hiwe found a way how to interlace these two together into maybe the most sophisticated chatting environment you have ever seen.
The Hiwe gives you a map of the entire world and lets you roam freely to any location you find interesting. Once you decide on your location be it Lower Manhattan, Paris or say India your virtual chat room will display conversations going on only within bounds of your currently viewed area. How precise you want to be when selecting location is up to you, for more general conversations you zoom out to view bigger portion of the world for more targeted conversations you can go to your home town and see who is already there.
Luckily the overall layout has deviated a lot from classical old time chats so you no longer see stack of sentences, instead messages are displayed in Memos. Memo is their name for a profile picture with custom message pasted over it. That way each message or Memo as they call it is far more engaging to other people present in or near your current location of choice to leave a comment or start a private talk conversation.
You are probably going to ask about geo-location. Desktop version of The Hiwe does not include geo-location facilities because quoting their words “Its pointless to restrict users into their physical position. We want to give people freedom to go and meet new people just anywhere.” A native smartphone app is on its way which will according to some sources have an opt in option to enable geo-location hence use its potential.
To sum up, The Hiwe sure did a great job in attempt to bring a great communication tool back from old times in terms of allowing strangers to communicate together. Back in the day you sure liked to chat with strangers over the internet as well right? Whatever happened to chats going extinct for a while there is always a way back and honestly they found it.
