This could be achieved with the cache only too, but I think that this is useful data
to persist. It may even turn into a ajax powered chat app.

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This might be nice to have between users too. You could send a user a message (which
would need to have an option in profile whether the user accepts messages or not).
Might need to spend some time moderating due to spammers.

Or you could have a user-level shout box. Facebook calls it a "wall", but its the
same thing. Other users could write on your wall or shout in your box or whatever.
That would need a profile option whether its enabled or not per user, etc.

Nice ideas, I'll implement them so. I don't think the spam problem will be huge as it
is mitigated by the procedures that we already have in place.

You could probably use the same database table for this. If ToUserId is null, then
its site wide otherwise its just to that user, etc. 

You might want a flag for "private" or "public". So public messages would show on
user's profile page and private would only be seen by sender/receiver. But you'll
also probably need a way for users to delete messages sent to them especially if the
messages are visible to the public since a message could be not nice, etc.

I'm thinking one table here too.

I'm not too keen on public/private messages for this iteration, maybe in the future
sometime.

notes from testing today:

when not logged in, you see textbox and shout button, but can't submit.
if this is user only feature, might want to hide or disable it for usability

need to add max length attribute to textbox

need to fix overflow in display on long words or repeated characters, etc.

need to trap for all whitespace entries

need to trap for only carriage return entries are allowed

need to Trim entries and remove any double whitespaces so things like "1      3" are
reduced to "1 3" since that's how browsers will render it and it just takes up extra
space in database

Just deployed revision 326 which adds a shout box to user profile pages.

How about adding a potential popup (hidden by default) to every page. In case you are
looking at an article and someone does a shout on your personal page, then the ajax
callback could check to see if a new shout has been added to your profile. If so,
then it opens the popup (non-modal, not really a popup, just an overlay layer). 

Sorta like how Gmail notifier does when you get new emails. It is like a little popup
in the lower left of your browser, but not modal. Can't find a reference for it now,
but I saw some example javascript to do it a while ago.

This would increase the server load, since every user will be having ajax callbacks
to check their shoutbox at whatever interval, so maybe it's not a great idea :)

In hyperlink to comments in the shoutbox the bookmark hash is outside of the URL. So
it looks like:

jamesewelch commented on [StringBuilder is not always faster]#2304: (6 minutes ago):

#2304 is outside of the hyperlink instead of on the href.

Any chance we'll get an API for adding/retrieving entries from the various 
shoutboxes? Perhaps an API for reading which users are online right now as well.

I was toying around with the idea of creating a desktop app that would allow you to 
see who is online and post to their shoutbox while receiving notifications of posts 
to your own shoutbox, but right now it looks like it would require parsing the HTML 
page to retrieve data and would be fairly convoluted to submit data (via a fake form 
post).