(2020-01-30) Yap The Best Chat App You Never Knew You Wanted Is Here

The best live chat app you never knew you wanted is here. Chat rooms have since fallen out of favor, thanks to the popularity of other text-based chat devices and services such as iMessage and Twitter. But a new web-based application from digital product studio Postlight, called Yap, is hoping to restore chat rooms to their humble glory.

The real-time chat room, which has no “scroll” feature because messages disappear as soon as they appear (just like real-life conversation!), demands that users live in the moment. “It’s built with ephemerality as the core guiding principle—we don’t save any chat logs, and the chat rooms explode after 24 hours of inactivity,”

Each chat room caps off at six participants, a function of practicality as much as smart programming. “It was largely a component of design; we’ve got a certain amount of space [on the website] and also the cognitive load,” Pash says. “It just feels too noisy and too chaotic to enjoy and take in [otherwise], so it was very much about finding the sweet spot where . . . it feels manageable and not chaotic. Chaos in a small group is because you’ve chosen it; chaos in a large group is because it’s an error.”