This morning started out like any other morning. I was working on my paper at the bar of Eastham’s chocolate sparrow. I had gmail open and noticed a new feature being offered.

Group chat.

I decided to try it out with Ben and Shamus. As expected, it worked. But… was there a limit to its capabilities?

We immediately set out on a goal to try and pull in 100 people into a single chat. We soon determined that this was HUGE overkill and I dropped our goal down to 50. 50… seemed possible. After about 30 or 40 minutes of telling people to invite more people and seeing our numbers raise and drop over and over again we hovered at 47. There was suddenly a huge drive and our numbers jumped to 51. FIFTY ONE. (fifty two if you include me). There was a choir of congratulations and then suddenly everyone left.

Unfortunately, my screenshot showing the number 51 failed. But the image above gives a quick visual display of how many 50 really is.

Was there a limit? well… not directly. But firefox wasn’t very happy with us. The lag time jumped considerably and people were having trouble joining.

Thanks to everybody who participated!! I hope you had fun.